“Yeah,” I said. Jessie stood next to me, the giant bag of school stuff in his arms, while I paid for my pitiful supplies. I should have been buying a suit of armor, but I hadn’t seen any on Mayor Handsome’s shelves—not that I could have afforded one anyway had it been in stock.
“Hey, Mayor Handsome,” I said as he handed me my bag, “what’s gold worth? I mean, like a piece of gold. What’s that worth?”
Mayor Handsome removed his oversize cowboy hat and scratched at his gray hair, somehow styled in a perfect slick wave despite the weight of the giant hat. “How much gold, Gus? Like a gold cow?”
What the . . . gold cow?
I shrugged. “I don’t know, like a piece.”
“Like a piece of gold toot?”
“Gold toot?” I asked.
“Gold toot.” He tapped his giant, glaringly white front tooth.
“No.” I shook my head. “I mean a regular little piece of gold. Like an ounce.”
Mayor Handsome continued scratching at his head, and I hoped he didn’t have lice. Someone always had lice in Nowhere, like this was their favorite place in the world to hang out. “I dink few hundred dollars.”
“How big a piece would that be?” I said.
Mayor Handsome opened the cash register and pulled out a quarter. “Maybe like dis.”
I nodded and smiled. “Great. So not too big then.”
“Vhy you vant to know, Gus? You found some gold? Vhere you find it?” He slapped his beefy hands down on the counter.
“Just curious.” I took a step back. “Thanks for your help.” I waved to Mayor Handsome.
Jessie followed me out of the store, a look of concern on his face. I stopped on the front porch and turned to him. “How’re your parents anyway?” I missed Jessie’s family. They had always brought some sense of normalcy to this town—some sense of not everything in the world being so messed up all the time.
Jessie shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Busy.”
“Busy with what?”
Jessie stared at me. “Why do you suddenly care about what’s going on with me?”
“Am I not allowed to care?”
Jessie just stood there, his bushy eyebrows furrowed, his lips pursed.
I shook my head. “Fine. Later.” I walked down the porch steps.
“You shouldn’t go, Gus.” I stopped and turned around. Jessie still stood on the porch. The giant bag of school supplies in his arms made him look small under the flickering porch light. “That mine’s caved in all over the place.”
The soft booms of the ostriches floated on the stuffy night air. “I told you. I don’t have any choice.”
“It’s just a motorcyle,” he said as I walked away.
But it was much more than that.
I snuck back into my bedroom window and laid my supplies out on the bed.
derisory: ridiculously small or inadequate
I tiptoed out of my room and stood at my grandma’s door. She was snoring in her wet, hacking, gasping, choking way. I crept into the kitchen and made a couple of bologna sandwiches, filled a large pickle jar with water, took our only tiny flashlight out of the junk drawer, then headed back to my room. I should have bought extra batteries for the flashlight, but it was used so seldom, I hoped it would make it through the night. Plus, batteries were expensive. Plus, I completely hadn’t thought about it.
Someone jumped out of my closet, and I shrieked in the most embarrassing way. Matthew Dufort threw himself onto my bed laughing.
My heart pounded. “You idiot,” I gasped and opened my bedroom door, listening for my grandma’s snoring. It still sounded like someone was gagging her to death in the next room, so I closed my door.
“Is this seriously what you’re going to use to go into the mine?” Matthew tossed my small hammer down on the bed.
“It’s all I’ve got.” I pulled off my T-shirt and pitched it into my clothes hamper. I opened my dresser drawer and dug out my AT LEAST IT’S A DRY HEAT T-shirt with the neon pink cow skull on the front. My grandma had picked it up for herself at an old Western theme park several years ago and had given it to me when it grew a hole in the side. Thanks, Grandma. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“Bo sent me. He wants to make sure you don’t go spray paint a rock or something.”
Why hadn’t that idea occurred to me? Well, it was too late now. “You’re going to go into the mine with me?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. I’m your supervisor for the night.”
“You always do what Bo orders you to do?”
He pushed his wavy, overgrown, light brown hair back from his eyes. The only way to get a haircut in Nowhere was to pay Mrs. Jenson ten dollars or cut your hair yourself. There wasn’t much difference in the quality of the haircut, so most people cut their own hair. “It’s better than eating cholla.” He snickered.
I glared at him. “No, it’s not.”
His smile faded, and I suddenly remembered when Matthew and I were in second grade and he had naïvely handed out cheesy Valentine’s Day cards to everyone. The one he’d given me had said I’d be lion if I said you weren’t sweet and had a picture of a cartoon lion on it. He had been teased relentlessly for those cards, especially by Bo, who, even back then, was a bully.
I had found Matthew in the bathroom at lunchtime, crying in a stall. When he came out, I gave him my Valentine’s card. Actually, I hadn’t brought any Valentines because Grandma had spent the last of our money on a whole case of Spepper, and besides, the second grade kids were already too cynical for Valentine’s cards. So I had made one from my notebook paper. I had written on it I’d be lion if I said you weren’t a great friend. He’d wiped at his freckled cheeks and smiled at the card. “Do you mean it?” he’d said.
Matthew pushed me, and I fell onto my bed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Gus. Anything’s better than that.”
I stared at him. “What kind of friend forces you to do things, especially things that could kill you?”
“Just shut up and get ready to go.” He grabbed my backpack and threw it at me.
I emptied the Twinkies into my bag while Matthew scoffed again at the hammer and chisel. “You’re never going to find anything with this stuff.”
“Oh, do you have a jackhammer with you?”
“Do you even have a lantern?” He picked up the tiny flashlight. “How are you going to hold this and dig at the same time?”
I snatched the flashlight out of his hands. “I’ll hold it in my mouth, I guess.”
Matthew shook his head. “Well, at least you’ve got pickles. That will be a big help.”
“It’s water. Did you even bring water? You’ll die of thirst before we ever get to the mine.”
Matthew shrugged. “I’m like a camel.”
“No, you’re not.” I snuck back into the kitchen and filled a jelly jar from the faucet. My grandma constantly saved old containers to store leftovers since we couldn’t afford “that fancy plasticware stuff” as she always said with such disdain, like fancy plasticware was the reason we were so poor. We had so many old containers at this point, I wondered if she was planning on using old margarine and whipped topping tubs to battle zombies in the apocalypse.
I went back to my room, where Matthew was busy rummaging through my backpack. “Couldn’t you at least have bought some Red Vines?” he said. “I hate Twinkies.” I handed him the jelly jar. “Nice. Do you have any peanut butter to go with this?”
“Just be glad you have any water at all.” I snatched my backpack away from him. “So stupid thinking you can walk five miles in the desert with no water,” I mumbled as I slipped my backpack over my shoulders. “And there’s no way I’ll be sharing my snacks with you.” I pointed my finger at him to make sure he knew I meant it. Plus, it made me feel tough.
“Hey, I’m not the reason we’re heading there in the first place. That was your stupid idea, so be careful who you’re calling stupid. Stupid.” Matthew climbed out the window.
; I looked around my room for a second, wondering if this was the last time I would ever see it. I was surprised to find it didn’t make me feel sad at all. I felt . . . nothing about it. Nothing at all.
I climbed out the window and quietly closed it.
“How long do you think it will take us to get there?” Matthew asked.
“It’s about two and a half miles to the other side of Hollow Mountain, so I’d say about forty-five minutes at most.”
And so we headed out into the dark desert, the pickle jar of water sloshing around loudly in my backpack.
Luckily, the moon was full, so I could watch my steps as I walked without turning on the flashlight and wasting the battery life. I scanned the ground for rattlesnakes. I once heard the majority of people bitten by rattlesnakes were drunk men at night, and I believed it because it had happened to my own great-grandfather. I was two for three here. And no, I wasn’t drunk.
I could see the mine in the distance as we got closer—a dark hole in the middle of the silvery mountain.
abyss: a deep or seemingly endless chasm
“You should just give this up, and we can both go home,” Matthew said. “Forget about Rossi. Bo will never give that bike back anyway. He’s determined to win tomorrow.”
“Yeah. And he knows the only way he can win is for her not to race.”
I stood at the entrance of the mine and took a swig of my warm water, which did have a faint pickle flavor. I evaluated the blackness. Yeah, it was really black. Evaluation over.
I turned on the flashlight and inched forward, Matthew following closely behind. “Maybe you shouldn’t follow me,” I said. The guy was a jerk for being friends with Bo, but if the mine did cave in, I didn’t want him to die, too.
“I have to make sure you find the gold in the actual mine.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. Bo’s orders.”
Matthew shoved me forward. “Stop being a baby and move.”
Someone had already smashed several slats in the wooden barricade, so we easily climbed through them. The mine smelled all of its one hundred years old—like dirt and rot and hot air that never moved. I shined the flashlight on the large wooden planks that were somehow holding the mountain up above us. Please don’t fail, I begged the century-old wood, imagining the entire mountain coming down on our heads. We might not make it out if that happened.
“We’d better go in deep,” Matthew said. “I’m sure this whole area is cleaned out.”
“I don’t need your advice.” I didn’t want to go deeper into the mine, but I knew Matthew was right. I pointed the flashlight ahead as we walked slowly together. The air was so hot and thick, I could feel it pushing back on me with every step. I was aware of each breath as it filled my lungs, making them heavy.
“That’s the part that caved in when those two drunk guys went in,” Matthew whispered when we came to a fork. One direction was a mess of rubble. “I guess they’re still in there.”
“No. They found those bodies. But the dead Frenchman is still back there somewhere.”
“Creepy. I saw this ghost hunting show, and Dead Frenchman Mine was on it. They said it was haunted by all the people who’ve died in here.”
“That’s ridiculous, Matthew.” I’d seen the show, too. Everyone in Nowhere had seen it. It wasn’t often Nowhere got in the news or on TV, but when it did, everyone watched.
“They had this machine that could record what the ghosts said,” Matthew went on. “And they recorded one saying, ‘Snooze snout toe duty.’”
“What does that even mean?”
Matthew shrugged. “I don’t know, but they said it was proof there were ghosts in here. One of the guys on the show also got scratched by the ghosts. He showed the scratches on his arm.”
I rolled my eyes. “Or maybe he bumped into the rocky wall.”
“No way. These were definitely ghost scratches.”
We went down a different corridor until we reached a dead end. “I guess we can try here.” I shined the flashlight on the dirt wall embedded with rock. “It’s as good a place as any.”
I eased my backpack onto the ground, careful not to break my jar of water, and removed the hammer and chisel. Then I put it back on in case I needed to make a quick escape. I tapped on the wall gently with my chisel.
“That’s going to do a lot,” Matthew said.
“I’m testing it,” I snapped. Truth was, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was terrified the whole mine would cave in if I hit the wall any harder.
I built up my courage with every tap and eventually was pounding the chisel hard enough to take some chunks out of the wall. “Why don’t you inspect the pieces I get off and see if you find any gold?” I told Matthew, who was holding the flashlight for me.
“Can’t do that and hold the flashlight and jelly jar at the same time.”
“You could put the jelly jar down.”
“A bug might crawl on it.”
I shook my head and went back to hammering the chisel. And then I heard something. I stopped, thinking it might have been an echo. “Did you hear that?” I said.
“Hear what? I don’t hear any—”
“Shh!” I stared at the ground and concentrated on listening. I definitely heard something—voices.
I looked up at Matthew. “Oh. My. Gosh,” he said, the flashlight shaking in his hands. His eyes bulged with fear. “It’s the ghosts!”
Matthew dropped the jelly jar of water, and it shattered on the ground at his feet. My heart beat rapidly. I knew in my brain ghosts weren’t real. But, you know, sometimes brains malfunction.
I grabbed at the flashlight. “Turn it off!” I whisper-shrieked, but both Matthew’s and my hands were shaking. We fumbled it for a full five seconds or so before finally getting it off.
Now it was totally dark. I could barely hear over Matthew’s hyperventilating, and maybe my own. We heard voices again. Matthew grabbed on to me. Maybe I grabbed on to him, too. No one ever needs to know about that, though.
“They’re getting closer,” Matthew said. They were definitely getting closer. “What do we do?”
Then we heard a voice shout, “Gus!”
Matthew squeezed me. “It knows your name! It’s here for you!”
My brain was starting to think clearly again. “Shut up.”
I heard her voice again. “Gus!” Rossi shouted. “Where are you?”
“Back here,” I called.
“Don’t tell it where we are!” Matthew cried.
“It’s Rossi.” I shoved Matthew off of me.
A small dim light traveled toward us, and Rossi and Jessie came into view. I walked to them. “What are you guys doing here?”
Rossi held a lantern up in one hand, her helmet in the other. “Jessie told me what you were up to.”
I frowned at him. “Why? Why’d you do that, man?”
“She should know you were planning on killing yourself for her.”
“As you can see, we’re totally fine.”
“We?” Jessie said.
I turned and pointed into the dark. “Matthew’s cowering back there somewhere, probably changing his pants. He thought you guys were ghosts.”
“Shut up, Gus,” Matthew shouted. “So did you.”
Rossi looked at me in the dim light. “I’m grateful for what you’re doing, Gus, but it’s not worth it.”
“I’m doing this no matter what.”
“Gus,” Rossi pleaded.
I crossed my arms. “I’m not leaving.”
“There’s no gold in here, Gus,” Jessie said.
“I guess I’ll find out.” I turned to Rossi. “Why did you bring your helmet?”
She rapped on it with her knuckles. “Protection.” She lifted it and put it over her head, her long ponytail flowing out the back. Then she swung her backpack around and pulled out an icepick. “If you’re not leaving, then I’m helping. It’s my bike, after all.” She glanced around the mine for a moment and sighed. “Dead Frenchman Mine, huh? Leave
it to some European dude to wreck a perfectly good mountain that didn’t belong to him.” She slammed her pick into the wall.
When Matthew saw Rossi chipping away at the wall, the helmet on her head, he groaned. “Why didn’t I bring my helmet? I can’t believe I have to stand here and watch you losers dig with tiny hammers and . . . sword-like thingies.”
“Pendejo,” Jessie muttered as he turned the lantern up.
I snorted; I may not have spoken Spanish fluently, but I knew what that word meant. And no, it doesn’t mean you’re an awesome human being or thank you for blessing us with your presence.
“What did you say?” Matthew asked.
Jessie took a screwdriver out of Rossi’s bag and shrugged. “I said, ‘Hey, let’s dig . . . oh.’”
Matthew eyed Jessie with suspicion. “I don’t think that’s what you said.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
Matthew leaned against the wall and yawned, his arms crossed. “This is the most pitiful bunch of digging tools I’ve ever seen.” He really did look like our supervisor.
“Why don’t you get off your lazy butt and help us?” Jessie said.
“I don’t have anything to dig with.”
“I bet you could find a sharp rock,” Jessie said. “I mean, besides the one on top of your neck.”
Matthew glanced at the ground. “None around. And why would I want to help anyway?”
“Because you’re not such a bad guy,” Rossi said through her helmet opening. “I don’t think you’re as mean as you’ve led people to believe.”
“Of course I am. I’m totally . . .”
“Menacing,” I finished for him. “You’re terrifying. Horrible. You give us all nightmares.” I felt a slap on the back of my head. “Ow!” I shouted and turned around.
Matthew glared at me. “Stop talking and keep digging.”
Jessie stopped scraping at the wall with the screwdriver and glared at Matthew. “Aren’t you related to that dead French guy?”
Matthew scoffed at Jessie’s comment. “Where’d you hear that?”
“William Dufort,” Jessie said. “That was the guy’s name. Like yours.”
24 Hours in Nowhere Page 4