A Change in Altitude

by Cindy Myers

  “A mine would make a good place to wait out dangerous times,” Reggie said. “A man with enough supplies could hold out a long time underground.”

  “Then let’s hope Bob and Gerald can reach some of those supplies, if it’s going to take a few days to get them out,” Charlie said.

  “This is perfect,” Amesbury said. “I must get a film crew out to capture this.”

  “Mr. Amesbury, two men are buried alive in a mine,” Lucille said. “In no way is that perfect.”

  “Not perfect for the men certainly. But it is perfect television. There’s nothing like life-or-death real-life drama to pull in the ratings.” He pulled out his phone and frowned at the screen. “There’s no signal? What kind of place doesn’t have a signal?”

  The kind of place where people—even people like Gerald Pershing—matter more than ratings, Lucille thought. But she didn’t bother saying so to Amesbury.

  He turned away. “Cassie! We need to drive back to town. Pronto.”

  Some other time it might have been amusing to see Cassie, who was so adept at ordering others to do her bidding, jump to wait on the imperious director. Maybe there is justice in this world, Lucille thought, as she turned back to confer with the rescue crew. If so, maybe it would help them get Bob and Gerald out of the mine alive. And then she’d give them both a lecture that would make them wish they were dead.

  Bob woke coughing, his head pounding, muscles aching. He hadn’t tied one on like this in a long time—not since Jacob Murphy’s wake. But as his vision cleared and he was able to draw a clear breath, he remembered that the pain had nothing to do with alcohol. He was in the Lucky Lady Mine. He’d been arguing with Pershing (he and the man never seemed to have a civil conversation) when the roof had caved in.

  With effort, he heaved to his knees and shoved aside a pile of loose rubble. The backpack he wore had protected him from the worst of the impact and his headlamp still worked, so that was something. In the dim glow he could make out a jumble of boulders and splintered timbers. The tunnel was blocked, though the passage he was in was mostly intact, littered with debris.

  A groan from said debris near the wall indicated that Pershing was coming to. Bob crawled toward the sound until he encountered a shoe. He tugged at it and was rewarded with a louder groan. He worked his way up the body, shoving aside rocks and dirt, until he unearthed the Texan’s face, gray as a statue with dust. “What happened?” Pershing croaked.

  “The damn mine caved in, that’s what happened.”

  Pershing shoved himself into a sitting position, his back against the tunnel wall, and looked around them. “I remember now. It sounded like an explosion.”

  “It was an explosion and it’s your fault.” He pulled a bottle of water from his battered pack, drank half of it, then handed it to Pershing.

  Pershing drained the water and sat holding the empty bottle. “My fault. How is it my fault?”

  “You went and made the Tommyknockers mad.”

  “The who?”

  “You decide to go into mining and you don’t bother finding out the first thing about it.” Bob coughed and spat. He was definitely getting too old for this. “The Tommyknockers are the spirits who live in the mine. They’ve been known to help a miner who gets into trouble; but rile them and there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “You’re talking nonsense.” Gerald brushed dust from his clothing. “Do you have any more water?”

  “If I did, why should I give it to you? You didn’t even say thank you.”

  “Forgive me for forgetting my drawing-room manners. Now, what do you really think happened, and what are we going to do about it?”

  “I told you what happened—The ’knockers got fed up with your lying and cheating and decided to do something about it, and I was unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire.” He took inventory of the pack: two sandwiches, another bottle of water, a pack of chewing tobacco, his phone, and a map of the mine. The phone was useless under all this rock. He’d save the sandwiches and water for later. He took a pinch of tobacco.

  “There’s no such thing as mine spirits,” Pershing said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because superstitions like that are nonsense.” He shoved himself to his feet, though he had to duck his head to avoid cracking it on the ceiling. Timbers groaned and a fresh shower of rubble rained down. Bob couldn’t have timed it better himself. Beneath the dust, Pershing’s face paled.

  “If you’d spent as much time underground as I have,” Bob said, “you’d have more respect for the Tommyknockers. This world is full of things you can’t explain with science.”

  “There’s a scientific explanation for everything, even if you’re too ignorant to know it.” He sat back down. “We probably hit a pocket of methane. And a spark off the rocks ignited it.”

  More likely a rat had chewed into the casing around the detonating cord Bob had stashed in his storage tunnel. He’d heard of something similar when he was working over near Leadville, back in the seventies. He should have wrapped it better. “You believe what you want to believe,” he said. “But I know what I know.”

  “What are we going to do to get out of here?” Pershing asked.

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “When that crew of engineers you hired to put in the escape tunnel on those plans the council approved shows up, they’ll dig us out.”

  He wished he had a camera to record the sick look on Pershing’s face. “Well, now, about that crew . . .” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and a fine sheen of sweat shone on his forehead.

  “There isn’t one, is there?” Bob glared, though inside he was holding back a grin. He’d suspected for a while now that Pershing was concocting another swindle; nice to be proved right, though the circumstances were less than ideal.

  “Um . . . no,” Pershing admitted.

  “What were you going to tell me—that they’d canceled?”

  “I was going to say they needed more drawings and a geological survey.”

  Bob nodded. “I imagine that would cost a lot of money.”

  “At least another ten thousand dollars.”

  The man had solid-brass balls, Bob would give him that. “How much of that would end up in your pocket?” he asked.

  “You don’t understand. I have obligations to meet, debts. My ex-wife was talking about court action if I didn’t pay her the money I owed, and a former business partner made certain threats I couldn’t ignore. I had investors expecting payments, and a certain lifestyle to maintain. I was going to pay it all back once the mine started producing.”

  Bob glanced up at the ceiling. What he really wanted to do was grab a good-sized rock and attempt to knock some sense into this old fool. But that probably wasn’t possible, though he might be able to scare him onto the straight and narrow— at least temporarily. “Good thing you had that extra ventilation put in,” he said. “At least we won’t suffocate.”

  Gerald put his head in his hands and moaned.

  “One of those falling rocks hit you?” Bob asked.

  “I only had half as many ventilation outlets installed as were on the plans I submitted to the town council,” he said.

  Half was probably plenty, Bob thought, but let Pershing sweat. “You know how to work every swindle, don’t you?” he said. “Guess you’ll pay for it now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe a rescue crew will get here before we run out of air. I guess we’ll find out.” He folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes.

  “Are you just going to sit there doing nothing?” Pershing asked.

  “What do you think I should do instead?”

  “Dig. Try to summon help.”

  “You think we’re going to bust through a wall of rock with our bare hands? And who’s going to hear us way down here?”

  Pershing rose to his knees and began pulling aside the rubble around him. “We might be able to break through if we
both work. We can’t just sit here and wait to die.”

  “I’m not waiting to die. I’m waiting for the rescuers. Someone will notice me missing eventually.”

  Pershing stilled, and for once he was silent. But he didn’t have to say anything for Bob to read his thoughts—no one would miss the old swindler. “You don’t think we should at least try to dig out?” he asked after a long moment.

  “All that work uses up oxygen faster, and it’s a waste of time and energy. They’ll need heavy machinery to get us out.”

  Pershing slumped back against the wall. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  “You might try apologizing to the Tommyknockers.”

  “There is no such thing as Tommyknockers!” Pershing’s shout echoed in the small space, and another chunk of rock broke loose from overhead and glanced off his shoulder.

  Bob laughed. “They do have a sense of humor.” He switched off his headlamp and tried to get comfortable on the hard floor.

  “What are you doing?” Pershing demanded.

  “I’m saving the battery.”

  Pershing said nothing and Bob dozed. He wasn’t thrilled about being stuck down here, especially with Pershing, but there was no sense panicking. Somebody was going to notice when he didn’t show up at the Dirty Sally, and he was supposed to give the town council a report tomorrow night. With luck, he and Pershing wouldn’t strangle each other before then.

  “Have you been trapped in a mine before?”

  Gerald’s words cut the profound silence and jerked Bob out of a hazy half sleep. He opened his eyes but could see nothing in the blackness. If not for the sharp rock at his back, he could imagine he was floating in nothingness. Disconcerting, but not unpleasant.

  “I said—have you been trapped in a mine accident before?”

  “I heard you. Yes, I’ve been caught once. In 1967. I hadn’t been in the business long.” And he hadn’t thought about that time for years. He had been so young and sure of himself in those days; only now, looking back, he saw how foolish he’d been.

  “What happened?” Pershing asked.

  “Another fellow and I were working for a bigger outfit, taking ore out of a shaft on the back side of a mountain. I got lazy. Greedy. I thought I’d cut corners on safety to get at the ore quicker, and I almost killed us both.” He closed his eyes. He could still see the other man, his face gray and silent, when they dug him out from the rubble, both legs crushed. He’d never work a mine again. Bob wondered if the man was still alive. He’d worked hard to forget the guy, and his own part in the accident, but of course he never had. Guilt was like that. You could push it down below the surface, but it always rose up again, like a body filled with gas.

  “Then that had nothing to do with your mythical Tommyknockers,” Pershing said.

  “It had everything to do with Tommyknockers,” Bob said. “They don’t like cheaters and they don’t care for greed. Wanting gold is one thing, but cheating other people to get it doesn’t set well with them. They punished me for it.”

  “Your carelessness caused the accident, not spirits.”

  “If you don’t believe in spirits, do you believe in the concept of karma?”

  “The idea that everyone gets what he deserves? Just look around at all the good people who suffer and you’ll see that’s a joke.”

  “You don’t believe you’ll reap what you sow? Maybe all those suffering good people get a higher reward in the next life.”

  “I don’t believe in that either.”

  “What do you believe in?”

  “The power of the individual to make his own destiny,” he said without hesitation.

  “Even if that means stepping on other people and taking advantage of them?”

  “If they’re naïve enough to be taken in by a scam, they’ll learn a lesson and be smarter next time.”

  “And you’ll be long gone, spending your ill-gotten gains. Or maybe you’ll end up rotting at the bottom of a mine shaft, the victim of the shortcuts you took.”

  Silence. Nothing like contemplating his own death to shut up a man. Bob closed his eyes again. He believed someone would come for them, but what if the collapse was worse than he thought and rescuers couldn’t reach them in time? Was karma deciding that he should die in the company of a man he detested? Had the sins he’d committed in his life—and he could admit there had been plenty, if mostly petty—doomed him to such a miserable end?

  So be it. He’d passed by his “three score and ten” a couple years back, and though he’d imagined living to be a hundred or more, he supposed he couldn’t complain. His only regret was the role he’d played in his own demise. He’d taken a risk, hiding all that ammo in a mine with the gunpowder and detonator rope. He hoped people didn’t think he was some nutcase terrorist, planning to blow up the government or anything. He was just a miner, and he’d wanted enough supplies to keep practicing his trade even if the world went to hell in a handbasket.

  “What do you care about the money I took anyway?”

  Pershing again. The man could not go five minutes without the sound of his own voice. “You took that money from people I like and respect,” Bob said.

  “From Lucille, you mean. It isn’t even her money. It belongs to the city. And I like and respect Lucille. She might even be the woman I’ve come closest to really loving. I never intended for her to take this so personally.”

  “You may know a lot about money, but you don’t know jack about women,” Bob said. “And I wasn’t talking about Lucille in particular. I was talking about the town. You stole from Eureka. From the people who work for the town, and those who rely on it for services. You took a community’s sense of trust and security. If it was up to me, they’d hang you up by your toes and let people take turns taking shots at you for that.”

  “Then I guess it’s good that you don’t make the laws.”

  “No, but I know the people who do.” And now that Pershing had confessed to taking the city’s money and pocketing it, he’d make sure the old fraud got what was coming to him.

  “Are you threatening me?” Pershing asked.

  “I wouldn’t waste my breath.”

  Fraud or not, Pershing wasn’t a dummy. It took about two seconds for him to realize what Bob had in mind. Bob switched on his headlamp in time to see the Texan leaning over him with a large rock. The light blinded them both, but Pershing didn’t have to see to feel the blade of Bob’s knife against his throat. “I didn’t have to dig you out of that rubble and I can put you back in there,” Bob said.

  Pershing dropped the rock and backed away. When he reached the wall, he slid down to a sitting position again. Bob kept the light on and studied the other man. “Do you really think they’ll find us?” Pershing asked.

  “Unless the Tommyknockers don’t want us found.”

  Pershing winced, but made no protest. Bob took his first really good look around the chamber where they were trapped. The space was maybe eight feet on each side, the ceiling too low for a man to stand upright. Where the rock had sheared off in the explosion, the walls were a sandy beige color, mica sparkling in the light from his lamp. Jagged timbers showed like broken teeth in the ceiling, and a tumble of rock, dirt, and broken wood clogged the only exit.

  Bob tilted his head back to aim the light up. A dark, heavy beam spanned the chamber—the only thing that had saved them from being crushed. Alongside the beam, chunks of rock had broken loose and fallen, revealing a six-inch-wide band of quartz. Bob’s heart beat a little faster as he stood and walked over for a closer look at this find.

  “What is it?” Pershing stood also and joined him in looking up at the beam. “Is it a way out? Can we dig to the surface?”

  “Can you dig through twenty or more feet of solid rock?” Bob reached up and scratched at the quartz, then shone the light again. A bright glint on the surface of the white quartz made him grin.

  “What is it?” Pershing demanded.

  “Gold.” With the tip of his knife, Bo
b chipped at the quartz and succeeded in dislodging a chunk about the size of his knuckle. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, admiring the shine. “Way more than I ever thought this old mine would yield. It could be our luck hasn’t run out yet after all.”

  Chapter 16

  “I’m just saying that, with Bob and Gerald trapped in the mine and everyone focused on that, maybe we should postpone the wedding.” Maggie shifted on the hard bar stool at the Dirty Sally. Her back hurt, her feet were swollen, she had indigestion, and she was sure she looked like hell. She had intended to have this discussion with Jameso at home, but as with everything else in her life these days, things hadn’t gone as planned and she’d ended up blurting out the idea in the saloon, where Jameso was stuck working a double shift to serve the influx of rescue workers, reporters, and curious hangers-on who’d flooded into town to cover the tragedy.

  “We’re getting married Saturday morning.” Jameso lined up three pint glasses on the bar and began filling them from the tap. “Your due date is Monday. I want to be able to tell my daughter that her parents were married before she was born.”

  “A due date isn’t exact. It doesn’t mean I’m going to have the baby then.” Maggie put a hand to her back and winced. Frankly, she was over being pregnant and wouldn’t mind if her little girl decided to make an entrance early. “And it doesn’t matter anyway. You’re the father, and that’s what the birth certificate will say.”

  He released the tap handle and looked her in the eye. “It’s important to me. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Of course, I just thought it would be easier this way.”

  “I don’t care about easier. Easier would be going to the courthouse in Montrose and letting a judge make us legal. But we can get married with everyone who cares about us on Saturday. Here in Eureka. I don’t want to wait.”

  Clearly, there was no sense arguing the point with him. “Fine,” she said. “When you get a chance, could you bring me a ginger ale?”