by Ashna Graves
“What do you think made Lance run off this time? It sounds like your fights are business as usual, and anyway, I think you said there wasn’t any fight,” she ventured after a silence.
“I wish I knew. He’s been worse than usual lately. He goes around like he has some kind of bag over his head, or like he’s thinking so hard he can’t see out of his eyes anymore. Then he does stupid things, like losing tools and leaving valves open, and starting in on the same job he just finished. I mean, you found his hat and knife out in the dirt. He never did take to mining like I did. He didn’t ever know what he wanted, but it wasn’t mining, no way doggies. I told him to go do something else then. Maybe he finally followed my advice.”
Reese took an extra long swig, wiped his mouth on his open hand, and said, “Now, tell me what you’re really doing out here.”
“Why does everyone ask me that?”
“Because you don’t fit, that’s why. You said you’re a journalist. I hope you’re not writing about mining. There’s so many lies about mining out there. They think we’re murderers, earth murderers. Shit. We’re just making a living. But I can tell you one thing.” He turned toward her and his voice dropped. “If you do write some kind of crap about mining, you’ll have me to answer to.”
“Do you always threaten people you’re having a friendly drink with?” Even as the words came out of her mouth, Neva marveled. Was this really her speaking? It was not at all her style, but it was just the right touch, playful while not weak, and it threw the ball nicely back in his court. She should drink whiskey more often.
“Well, shit, if you put it like that. It wasn’t a threat. I’m just saying don’t tell lies about us. People like you always write about us like we’re a bunch of stupid Okies and dumb shits.”
“Do I treat you like a dumb shit?”
“No, you don’t. But I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking either, but I’m not insulting you over it.” This was fun. Smiling in the dark, Neva reached for the bottle just as Reese did. Their hands collided and were snatched back at the same instant, with stereo “sorry, sorry about that, go ahead, you first” and then they both laughed.
“Go ahead and write whatever you want,” said Reese. “Just send me a copy.”
“I almost hate to say it, but I’m not writing anything about mining. I’m really and truly out here for a rest. I keep a daily journal, but that’s it for writing.”
“Then why do you ask so many questions?”
“It’s just a habit from years of journalism. This is a new world out here. I don’t know anything about mining or ranching, and the best way to find out is from the people who do it. Plus I’ve become really interested in finding out all I can about my uncle. Believe it or not it had never occurred to me there were people out here who knew him. We didn’t know he was part of a community.”
Reese gave a low grunt. “Since we’re being so goddamned honest I might as well admit that you worry me. We mind our own business out here, and when you get somebody that doesn’t, well, you wonder why. You wonder what they’re up to. Down at the café they think you’re after your uncle’s gold.”
“It never crossed my mind that he might have any.”
“Then what’d he spend thirty years mining for?”
“Gene said he has two mines and both are worthless. Of course, I didn’t believe him.”
“Well, Gene’s different. He’s too smart to grub around in the dirt like the rest of us—” He leaned forward abruptly. “Who in Jesus name is coming up the creek this time of night?”
In the darkness below, headlights flickered through the trees, tiny and silent like fireflies. “It must be the truck I told you about, Reese, that comes up at night.”
“What truck? You didn’t tell me about any truck.”
Confused, Neva tried to think back over the past few hours of rambling talk, but the whiskey won and she couldn’t be sure what had been said by either of them. “I’ve heard it several times late at night. I have no idea where it goes. There’s nowhere to go. Don’t you ever hear it?”
“Don’t be funny. When the sun goes down I sleep like road kill. Anyway, if I wasn’t looking for Lance I wouldn’t give a shit who comes and goes out here. It’s a free country.” He was standing now, feet planted wide, arms crossed on his chest, his head cocked as he listened and watched. They were silent, waiting, and at last the faint sound of an engine reached them.
“Let’s go,” he said. Kneeling, he reached for the bottle, knocked it over with a clatter and an oath, and snatched it up again. “Shit. We may as well kill it.” He threw back his head and poured the whiskey down with a gurgle.
When it was her turn, Neva did the same without hesitating, and felt hot liquid spill from the corner of her mouth and run down her cheek to her ear, where it turned cold. Reese emptied the bottle on the next pull, then said in a schoolboy chant, “As a feather is wafted downward from an eagle in its flight.” Cocking his arm back, he hurled the bottle out into black space. Neva listened for the crash of glass on rock, and when it didn’t come she felt the world had shifted in some inexplicable way so that bottles could fly and swarthy miners quoted poetry and large trucks appeared and disappeared without reason. She stood up, swayed and caught herself against the rock. Reese had vanished but she didn’t care. She could walk back to her cabin if need be, heck, she could roll, just tuck in her head and tumble down the slope through the sagebrush like a tumbling tumbleweed—
“Hey! Are you coming or what?”
“Yo-o-o-o-,” she called. Smiling, walking with big steps, she made her way back through the tall mustard or whatever it was to the truck. “It doesn’t smell like peaches anymore,” she said as she climbed in.
“What about peaches? You really are crazy. Did you say you were old enough to be my mother? That’s a damned lie. When we get down off here I’m going to give you a big kiss.”
How they made it down Neva couldn’t remember later, other than that there was a lot of bouncing and banging and whooping, and then they were on the mining road, and Reese was saying, “Which way, we don’t know which fucking way he went.”
He turned hard left toward the top of the canyon, which they reached without seeing any sign of a truck. About half a mile farther on they came to a trench cut across the road that even Reese wouldn’t tackle.
“So he has to be behind us,” he said, cranking the wheel over hard. “Maybe he’s down at your place.” With that he was racing back in the other direction, skidding on turns, and catching the quick glint of wild yellow eyes in the headlights. Neva simply held on and trusted to fate. Her head was large and her hands and feet numb, whether from cold or whiskey she had no idea. The thought of sleep had taken strong hold in her mind so that she no longer cared about dinner or even about finding the mystery truck. All she wanted was to be in her quiet, warm bed.
They reached her car without seeing anything unusual. Reese followed her down the lane to the cabin and when he saw that the truck wasn’t there he bellowed out the window that he was goddamned if he was going to let anybody play such a trick on him, he was going back up the mountain and find the bastards if it took all night. With that he wheeled around the woodshed and was gone in a spray of rock and dust.
Crawling into bed without any of the usual preparation other than removing her clothes, the bed tilting strangely but not unpleasantly under her, Neva tried to think back over the day but it seemed very long and jumbled. Was it only this afternoon that she had met that troublesome puppy Andy Sylvester? She should have told Reese about that one, just for the fun of the fireworks.
Chapter Twelve
“I got the knife when I went up in the morning,” Skipper said, handing Neva a large mug full of coffee. “I didn’t mean to make trouble for anybody, but it didn’t make any sense leaving a perfectly good knife out there. And I had sort of thought that I’d seen a hat like that sometime recently. Seems I was right.”
> Sitting in the shade under a pine tree outside Skipper’s camper, Neva drank the strong coffee gratefully, hoping it would do for her aching head what her first cup had failed to accomplish. Half a bottle of whiskey…how could she have been so idiotic?
“You look peaky, W.T.,” Skipper teased. “Beats me what you were doing drinking with that character. He looks to me like the kind of guy that likes the smell of his own farts. You know what he told me the other day? He said he always keeps more of the gold than he lets on to the mine owners. He calls it his ‘percentage.’ Now, I admit that would be a serious temptation even for a saint, but it’s stealing just the same. I’d sure like to know what’s going on around here. Nothing ever went on here before, not that I knew about, except for your uncle’s disappearing trick. I’m tempted to stick around for a few more days, but once I’ve decided to move on I just have to go or I get real uncomfortable. You fixing to move down here on the creek soon?”
“I’m still thinking about how to handle the Forest Service. Andy Sylvester’s so young it’s hard to take him seriously, but I guess I should decide on some kind of action. On the other hand, I could go on playing deaf and see what they do next. I did hear a strange thing from Sylvester. He said Orson isn’t the sole owner of the mine. Do you know anything about that?”
“Can’t say I do. I’ve wondered a time or two why things keep in pretty good shape around the place. And I’ve thought now and then that somebody had been getting ready to mine again. That pile of pipe over behind the old outhouse turned up new last year. It never seemed worth bothering about, but now you ask I’m kind of curious myself.”
“I should have thought of it before,” Neva mused. “The law says you have to pay a fee every year or do a certain amount of work on the mine or you lose the claim. I don’t know the details, but I do know that Orson hasn’t set foot out here for an age, and he has no money. So why didn’t the claim go back to the government?”
“That’s a thought. If it had, you can bet your booties they’d have burned that cabin down like they did the old Johnson place and half a dozen others I could name. A damned shame.” Skipper settled on a canvas chair and Cayuse moved from his spot at the base of a tree to lie at his feet. “As for that truck disappearing, it’s no big deal. You have so many old roads around here it could go anywhere. Too bad Reese ran all over in that big rig of his or we might tell something from the tracks. What it’s doing up here at night is the question.”
They sat for a while in silence, Skipper visibly pondering while Neva nursed her head. At length he said, “What do you make of Reese Cotter?”
“Smart, with a dangerous temper and some sort of chip on his shoulder. He actually got a little tearful about Lance, and seemed to feel guilty for being tough on him. I have to say he was very good company. I remember laughing a lot, and it wasn’t just the whiskey.”
“I hear he knows mining as good as anybody so he always gets jobs even if he is quick to blow and skims off his percentage. You may as well know I’m not feeling too great about leaving today with all this happening, and you alone at the mine. It doesn’t feel right in my bones, and my bones are about as trusty as Cayuse’s nose.”
“I really appreciate your concern, Skipper, but there’s no reason to worry about me. Truly. My only problem is the possible eviction and there’s nothing you could do about it other than help me carry stuff down to camp if I have to move. And that I can definitely handle.”
“A man has disappeared, W.T. Kind of like your uncle, in case you hadn’t noticed, and his cap and knife have turned up without him.”
“We don’t know that he really disappeared. He walked off the job in a huff and most likely lost things along the way.”
“Still. My bones aren’t happy. I’ll be moving out of here in the next hour or so but I guess I’ll head back this way in a few days, just to check things out. Meantime, keep your distance from that Cotter outfit. Are you sure you don’t want a bit of the hair of the dog for that headache? And I don’t mean Cayuse.”
***
Standing in the camp watching the old artifact hunter pull out, Neva felt genuine regret that she could not have imagined just a few days ago, when the arrival of the white truck had seemed to signal the end of her happiness on the creek. She would miss Skipper, and was glad he’d decided to come back this way before too long.
Half an hour later she followed him down the canyon, the hat and knife beside her on the car seat. She slowed down when she passed the Barlow Mine cabins, where Reese’s dog was tied to a porch post, but she didn’t stop. Reese and Roy were undoubtedly working in the pit at this time of day and she preferred to put his brother’s things directly into Reese’s hands. Today no yellow bulldozer blocked the road, and when she got out of the car at the entrance to the mine she was met by perfect silence. When it was operating, the trommel could be heard for a mile up the road, the ore crashing into the funnel like thunder. Even when the equipment wasn’t running there were generally voices shouting, and vehicles rumbling around. Now the excavation was as quiet as though it had been abandoned like most of the Billie Creek mines.
The steep track leading down into the mine was scored by deep wheel marks in the gravel. The young men must have driven down, but her little Honda would never make it back up even if it managed to get to the bottom. She didn’t mind walking, though the air soon turned hot and heavy, the high banks blocking any movement of air. At the bottom of the road she stopped to study the scene, which appeared just as it had yesterday apart from a blue pickup that was now parked next to the trommel. Reese’s red pickup was not in sight, though it could easily be somewhere up the pit among the mounds.
“Haaalloooooo!” she called. Her tiny voice disappeared without an echo.
Trudging toward the pickup through heaped gravel, she found it impossible to believe that this had been a healthy creek bed not so long ago. How could Andy Sylvester call the Barlow Mine a model project?
The pickup was pulled in close to the trommel, with the driver’s side next to the ladder. She peered through the dusty window on the passenger’s side and found the cab surprisingly tidy, with only a lunchbox on the seat. It must be an oven in there. Runny cheese, half-cooked apple, liquid chocolate bar. They should take a cue from Andy Sylvester and keep a cooler in the truck—but what was she thinking? They had no electricity at the mine cabins, no refrigerator and no way to make or keep ice. It was unlikely they even bothered with a cooler in the creek, although Reese might be driven to such a refinement by warm beer.
The dome light was on, which, she realized after further peering, must be due to the failure of the driver to close his door properly. She circled the truck, pushed the door shut, and turned to climb the ladder for a better view, but the metal rung burned her hand. Snatching it away, she moved out from between the truck and the trommel to where she could scan the entire excavation. A desert of rocky dunes, it felt empty, without life apart from her own small presence. No water trickled, no trees whispered, no birds called in the distance. To hear Reese talk, mining was a swashbuckling life, but to spend even a day in this pit would be hell.
She turned and began trudging back toward the entrance, but had gone only a few steps when she stopped and looked once more toward the opposite end of the pit. Ten minutes would get her there and back. She was unlikely to come down here again and it now seemed like a waste to have ventured this far a second time without seeing the whole Barlow operation.
Wheel tracks led away through the gravel, winding between mounds. Aiming for a mound that stood somewhat above the others, she followed the tracks to take advantage of the slightly packed gravel. Still, her feet sank at each step and sweat streaked her face. When she reached the base of the tall mound she started up without pausing, but soon slipped backward as though on a steep sand dune. She bent to dig in with her hands but recoiled from the hot, sharp little rocks. Balancing upright on the slope, ignoring the stones in her shoes, she scanned the stretch of pit behind her, the dis
tant trommel, the pickup truck. Such still silence on a working day really was strange. Could Reese have had an accident last night after dropping her at the car? Could he be lying somewhere up the canyon, unconscious or dead in his truck? Could Roy have gone in search of his partner?
Neva shook her head thoughtfully. Someone had driven the blue truck down here. These young men didn’t walk anywhere if they had a choice, she was certain, so where was Roy?
“Hallooo,” she called, and again her voice disappeared, a mere pebble in the petrified sea of stone.
Most likely Roy had gone somewhere with Reese, but still she had to walk on to the end of the pit or slog to the top of the mound or she would not feel comfortable leaving the mine. Her concern wasn’t rational, but she had learned long ago not to ignore such feelings. The mound wasn’t high and she could sit down on top while she scanned the territory.
Two steps upward, one step back…Like a bug trapped in an ant lion pit.
With a forced burst of energy, she flung herself uphill, scrambling on all fours despite the nasty gravel. She reached the top, collapsed on her stomach, and stared in shock at empty space.
Had the bottom dropped out of the earth?
Moving with slow care, she eased forward and peered down, far down. Instead of the other side of a sloping mound, as she expected, she faced a drop-off into a second pit with a floor a good thirty feet lower than the bottom of the main excavation. Had she managed to climb the mound standing upright, she might have tumbled right into the pit headfirst, in which case she would have left the mine a corpse.
Damn those crazy Cotters—anyone else would put up warning signs or flagging.
Angry and shaken, Neva eased back away from the edge and lay with her head on her arms until her heart slowed down. Then she hitched forward again to study the strange scene below and realized that she was looking at an old mining chamber. Unlike the rough, bulldozed excavation of the current mine, this pit was a neat rectangle, with dark pillars supporting the walls except along a caved-in stretch on the opposite side. Boards and other debris littered the rocky floor, and a dark opening in the right wall surely was a tunnel entrance. Maybe it was one of the original Chinese-dug mines, in which case it was of historic importance. Could Reese have gone to town to report the discovery?