by Ashna Graves
“Are those knives unusual?”
“You bet. I special ordered it from an outfit in Grays Harbor. It’s a custom design. Most of them don’t have this nifty little bugger.” He held up the tweezers, but he was paying more attention to the yellow pebble in the palm of his hand. “See that? Jewelry grade. We’re turning up a lot of these the last few days. They’re too pretty to sell.”
The reverence in his voice made her forget the knife for a moment and instead consider his bent head, which was covered with wavy black hair many women would envy and others would want to sink their hands into. As for the nugget, like the one in the tobacco can, it looked like nothing to her except a dull yellow blob with a bit of grit clinging to it.
“See that?” He tilted his hand so the stone rolled. “The gold on Billie Creek is famous for its color and purity. My mom’s fillings are all Billie Creek gold. She wouldn’t have any other and neither would her dentist. I wouldn’t mind having gold teeth myself.”
She held out her hand for the nugget. He tipped it onto her palm and turned to the table to look for more. After inspecting it for long enough to show proper appreciation, she handed it back and said, “I recently saw a knife just like that one. It even had the pliers.”
Reese froze half bent over the table and said nothing for a moment, then straightened and turned slowly toward her, showing a face that had lost its flirtatious warmth. “Where was it?”
“Up the road past the turnoff to my place, by an old water trough.” As Neva spoke the explanation came to her—the knife must belong to his missing brother Lance.
Reese gazed over her shoulder for several moments with an unseeing look. Then he glanced down at the tool in his right hand, folded it with a quick snap, and put it in his pocket, at the same time removing a rolled blue cap from the other pocket and jamming it onto his head. Neva didn’t have to look to know it said “Wallowa Tractor and Irrigation.”
“There was a cap just like that not too far away from the knife.”
“Well for fuck’s sake why didn’t you tell me?”
Reese’s sudden ferocity made her recoil backward on the catwalk. Her foot hit a support strut and she fell against the railing. His hands flashed out, grasped her shoulders, and pulled her upright again without a break in his outpouring. “Those belong to my brother and nobody else, hear me? He went missing. We didn’t have a goddamn clue where he went. Not a goddamn clue.”
She looked at him without speaking until he said with controlled calm, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get rough, it’s just I’m worried about the little sonofabitch and you gave me a shock. He doesn’t have all his marbles, if you know what I mean. He’s not safe on his own. Where’s the hat and knife now?”
“I left them where I found them, at the water trough. I had no idea they were Lance’s.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
She followed him down the ladder and up the slope, half running to keep pace with his stride. Roy was just closing his toolbox, and stood up when they reached him. Taller and less visibly muscular than Reese, he looked like an overgrown kid as he raised his hand in a mock salute and said, “Ready to sail, captain.” Then he saw Reese’s face and looked quizzically at Neva, but Reese spoke first. “She found Lance’s knife. His hat, too. Move this turkey out of the way. I’ll be back in a while.”
“Wait a second,” Roy said, but Reese strode by with a terse, “Can it, Roy. I’ll be back.”
“But I want—” he tried again.
“I said can it. I’ll be back in a jiff.”
Neva exchanged a sympathetic look with the young man, and was struck by his dark eyes, the irises precisely defined against the clear whites in the manner of a Byzantine painting. She said, “He’s really worried.”
Roy shrugged and smiled, the two conflicting gestures seeming to sum up frustrated good intentions.
“He’ll be right back. Nice to meet you.”
By the time they were seated in her car with the engine running, Roy had the bulldozer moving and they were able to pass, just clearing the sloped bank on the right where Neva noted a single set of tire tracks in the exposed earth. Sylvester’s little truck must be four-wheel drive, she thought with the part of her brain that automatically took in such details.
“Stop at the house and I’ll get my truck,” Reese ordered. They said nothing during the short trip to the upper lip of the mine pit where the two cabins stood, but when she pulled up to the porch, he said, “Come on inside.”
Feeling like a child who has misbehaved and has lost the right to question, Neva followed him into the nearest cabin, which was dark and reeked of grease and dirty socks. A small black and white dog leaped off a bunk and dashed around Reese’s legs in happy greeting but he took no notice. “See there.” He pointed at a guitar hanging on the wall above an unmade bed. “That there’s Lance’s guitar. He never went anywhere without his guitar in his life, even when I treated him like a useless turd. Which I did just about every day of his life. I’m his big brother, right? That’s the way it works, isn’t it, I push him around and he pushes around whoever he can? The weird thing is, we didn’t even have a fight this time. Things were going good for a change.”
Savagely, he kicked a boot that was in his path, yanked open a drawer, and pulled out a handgun. “Don’t worry, I’m not planning to use it, but you never know in the mountains.” Lifting a worn Army surplus knapsack down from a nail driven into the plywood wall, he began stuffing things into it, a shirt, box of matches, water, flashlight, and a bottle of whiskey.
Within minutes they were back out the door and he was climbing into the nearest of two pickups, a dusty red Ford with huge wheels like a Tonka toy. “You can leave the car at your cabin turnoff and ride with me.”
Reese shot up the road. Following more slowly, Neva worked through an internal argument between the part of her that was fascinated by smart roughnecks like Reese and the part that wanted to keep plenty of distance. It might be fun racing up the ridge with Reese Cotter to claim his brother’s lost possessions. On the other hand, he was overwrought and a known wild driver, and it had been a long and complicated day. The sensible course was to give him directions and let him find the hat and knife on his own. He couldn’t miss the water trough.
Reese was waiting at the head of the cabin lane, his truck engine idling. She left the Honda in the lane and went up to his open window to make her excuses. He sat with his head bowed, his big hands gripping the steering wheel, and when she spoke, he didn’t look at her.
“Reese, I’m really tired and need to go back to the cabin. You’ll see the water trough, no problem. Just go up the road a mile or two and it will be on the left, right in plain sight. I’m sorry, I’m not very good at estimating distances.”
He glanced at her then, and his eyes were unmistakably wet, although without actual tears. “Right,” he said, looking away again. “Thanks.” Rather than shove the truck into gear, he continued to sit with his hands on the steering wheel and his gaze fixed on the road beyond the dusty windshield.
What had she stumbled into? Had he bellowed like a wounded bull he couldn’t have appeared more in pain—and it would have been far easier to know how to react to a raging bull than a tearful miner.
“I’m such a shit,” he said. “There’s just the two of us, kids that is, and I mostly raised him. You think you can keep a kid out of trouble by being there, but sometimes I wonder if I was his biggest trouble. Maybe he would have figured things out if I wasn’t always there with the answers. Some kind of answers, anyway. Shit.”
“I have a son,” Neva said, relieved to be back on familiar territory. “Probably about Lance’s age. When you come right down to it, people are who they are, and they’re going to do what they do. You can only help so far. It’s a cliché, but true.”
“I never knew exactly what that means—cliché.” Reese still kept his gaze forward but his voice was steadier. “I lost my dictionary about a hundred years ago.”
“A cliché is something, a word or expression, that’s overused and unoriginal, and loses some of its force or meaning because of being obvious or just too familiar.”
“Are you a school teacher?”
Neva laughed. “Nope, not a teacher, a journalist. But if I use a word wrong in one of my columns, I hear from all the retired English teachers in town. It’s pretty embarrassing so I check definitions all the time.”
Reese looked directly at her now, not quite smiling but clearly amused. “You sure you don’t want to come with me? It won’t take long.”
Though he appeared to have calmed down, he accelerated before she was fully seated. She grabbed for the armrest and half shouted above the engine roar, “The road’s pretty bad. I don’t think you can drive all the way to the trough.”
“Watch me.” His grin showed no trace of the earlier emotion. “That spring used to be the best water in the canyon.”
“I thought you were new here, but you seem to know your way around.”
“My grandparents lived over at Charity. I ran all over these hills when I was a boy, me and Lance together, and I’ve mined just about every major creek drainage between here and Malheur. Shit.” He swerved around a large rock, skidded toward the edge on the canyon side, regained control and said coolly, “What are you doing fooling around old mines anyhow?”
“Exactly that, fooling around. I’m out here for my health. Really, it’s true even though no one seems to believe it.”
To walk to the trough from the cabin lane would have taken more than half an hour, but Reese got there in minutes, barely slowing down for washouts and boulders. He pulled into the wide spot and was out the door while the truck was still shuddering from the violent stop.
Neva got out slowly, staring at the empty rim of the trough where the hat and knife should have been. “They’re gone, Reese. They were right here.”
“You’re sure it was here?”
“Absolutely. They were half-buried over there where it’s all trampled up. I put them on the edge of the trough so they could be seen from the road.” She peered in to be sure they had not fallen onto the algae somehow, but the mat lay thick and undisturbed. “Skipper said he was coming up for a look. Maybe he took them.”
Reese wasn’t satisfied until he’d searched the entire area and gone over the trampled bit on his hands and knees. Under a rock he found a silver dollar, which he clasped, then began to search even more furiously. Neva wandered about feeling weary, hungry, and uneasy, her sympathy overshadowed by Reese’s alarming mood. It was getting late. She was ready for a bowl of something hot, and an evening alone on the porch.
At last he crossed to where she had settled on a rock and sat down with a groan. “He was here all right, he was here, so where the hell is he now? He wouldn’t leave his knife behind if he had any choice, he does have that much sense. It’s not so easy to disappear out here, you know. Maybe for rabbits, but not for people. Something happened to the dumb shit. It always does when he gets out of my sight, and one of these days it’s going to be serious, real serious.”
Chapter Eleven
Food was the main thing on Neva’s mind as they climbed back into the truck. Tonight she would eat one of her two cans of China Lily curry sauce on rice, followed by something sweet. She hadn’t stocked actual desserts, but she would make something with lots of brown sugar and cinnamon to eat on the porch, and then she would go to bed early. The sun had gone down behind the ridge and it would be dark soon.
But instead of wheeling around and heading back down the canyon, Reese sped up the road. Before she could protest, he cranked the steering wheel hard to the left. The truck slid sideways, sending up a spray of gravel and dust, and then tore uphill through low trees and sagebrush where there was no sign of a road.
“This used to go through to the top,” he shouted with the air of a tour guide. “Maybe we’ll see something from up there.”
“Reese, stop!” The words came out in a shriek, but she didn’t care how she sounded. She’d had enough. “I’m going home. I’ll walk back.”
“Can’t stop, I’d never get going again.” He gunned the engine and the truck bounced and kicked like a wild animal in flight.
“It’s getting dark,” she yelled, but it was impossible to stop this crazy man. And suddenly, looking at where he was going, Neva was intrigued. He was zigzagging up the nose of a low ridge, cutting in and out of small clumps of mountain mahogany and juniper trees, climbing fast. “Where does this end up?”
“It doesn’t end up, that is, if you know your stuff you can get right over the mountain and down to Elkhorn. You can also get lost pretty bad. What bothers me is what the hell did Lance come up here for? We haven’t been up this way since we were kids. There’s nothing up here.”
They pulled out on top just as the sun dropped below the mountains to the west. Reese brought the pickup to a lurching stop on a flat covered in knee-high plants with small, pale pink flowers, grabbed his knapsack, and strode away toward the canyon rim. Rather than hurry after him, Neva paused to smell the richly colored evening air. It carried a faint hint of peaches, which seemed to come from the little, mustard-type flowers. She hadn’t been up here so late in the day before because she would not have been able to get back to the mine on foot by dark. Now she was glad that Reese had dragged her along.
When she caught up, she found him sitting on the ground with his back against a small outcrop of limestone, scanning the deeply shadowed creek basin through binoculars. It was a fine vantage point, but what he hoped to see she couldn’t guess. She settled close by, also leaning against the rock. He lowered the glasses and turned to her with a face that was sad again despite the tough words.
“I don’t know what I expected. It was probably a stupid idea, but I just have this feeling he’s out here somewhere.” He jammed the binoculars into the knapsack and pulled out the whiskey, his forearm flexing like an independent live thing as he twisted the cap off. He raised the bottle to his mouth, then lowered it without drinking and offered it to Neva. “Ladies first.”
Was she to drink with everyone out here? First Skipper, then Tony, now Reese. In the months following the surgery, she had given up her daily glass of wine before dinner, not on doctor’s orders but as an instinctual effort to help her body find its normal self again. The beer at Angus had nearly put her to sleep. The whiskey with Skipper had made her arms and legs rubbery, and she had laughed up at the stars on the walk back to the cabin. To swig straight whiskey with this complicated young miner could have an even more debilitating effect, but if he drank the whole bottle himself, he might kill them both trying to get down the ridge in the truck.
The bottle was there between them, suspended, waiting.
To refuse would be rude…and she needn’t do more than sip. Maybe she could pour some out surreptitiously once it was full dark, if they stayed that long. She touched the bottle to her lips and allowed a small trickle to pass. It was enough to burn her throat and send warm currents into her arms and legs. She took another small sip, released a long breath, and leaned easier into the rock. The stars came out as they drank. The whiskey took away her hunger, and the flannel shirt Reese dug from his pack kept her warm. He insisted that he was fine in the overalls.
“I lost my jacket so many times when I was a kid they quit buying me any,” he said. “I never notice hot or cold. Maybe that means I’m a primitive type of human, I don’t know, but it beats being a candy-ass. Lance is a candy-ass and always was a candy-ass. He would have been beat to crap in school if I didn’t protect him. Of course, I had my price. Who doesn’t?
“You know what I figure? I figure I was born a hundred years too late. This is no kind of world for me, all this regulation and everybody looking over your shoulder. I’m a professional, you know what I mean? Just before the Mormon Basin job I headed up a job over in Colorado, an environmental cleanup. Ha! I thought that would surprise you. But it’s the same thing. You take a bunch of dirt and you run it through a
process, and in one operation you get gold and in the other you get some kind of poison chemicals. Then you take all the dirt and put it back in the ground and nobody can tell the difference. If you know what you’re doing. Which I do. I went to college, you know, two years, geology, chemistry, mineralogy, you name it. I didn’t get such shit-hot grades but I learned enough. My people aren’t trash. My granddad was the mayor of Elkhorn back when I was a kid. He had a huge house, one of the best in town, but the dumb shit lost everything in a poker game. They turned it into a funeral home. Can you beat that? I could be living there. I guess maybe this family isn’t too big on what they call good judgment.”
“Is that the one a few blocks up from the post office, the Garden of Eternal Peace?”
“That’s the one. It’s the only one.”
“Well, that’s funny. I filled my water bottles there this morning, from the outside tap.”
“Lucky you. I never go near the place. It pisses me off too much. How much did they charge for the water?”
“Actually, the man seemed surprised that I didn’t mind taking water from a funeral home. He knows a lot about bugs.”
“That’s Darrell. He used to run around with one of those stupid net things before his dad cheated in the poker game. Just kidding about that. He won the house fair and square. It was my grandfather who was the idiot, but it’s water under the bridge now. I’m probably better off out here than anywhere, so no great loss.”
The bottle was half gone, and sat between them for long intervals before one or the other would reach and swig. At first Neva drank only when Reese handed her the whiskey, but she got into the rhythm and soon kept pace with him as though they were playing a game involving serve and return. Her uneasiness about the drinking had vanished. She felt simultaneously at ease and extraordinarily alert, not only to the night but to Reese himself. He seemed to her like a peculiar sort of hero, tough and ready for anything life might dish up, but also tragic and potentially dangerous should circumstances call for it. Twenty years ago, she might have been attracted despite their differences. Now her response was almost maternal, maybe because of the tears he had not quite shed and the confusion and regret about his brother.