by Chloe Garner
“Could be a lot,” she said. He shrugged.
“But it ends, at some point.”
She nodded. That’s all there was to it. She handed him one of the sticks and they started digging.
––—
The floor behind them had inches of sand on it, but they were making progress. They’d wedged the sealing stone up several times and now had a steady stream of sand rolling down the entrance and into the main space.
“You want to try one more wedge?” Jimmy asked. Sarah looked at it and nodded.
“I think it’ll go.”
He disappeared and came back with another stone that they put underneath the sealing stone and pounded against the V, raising the front edge of the stone another quarter inch. It was like they pulled the capstone out of an arch.
The sand started to roll past them in increasing quantities, and they pressed themselves against their respective sides of the entrance, only inches away from each other, and watched as the stream of sand turned into a river. Sarah put her shoulder up into the sealing stone and it shifted, the stones holding it up falling in as more sand rushed in. Jimmy took another step up the entrance path and helped her lift.
More sand, but now there was light from outside.
Like sucking free of mud, the flat stone turned over, and they stood in the sun.
They were in feet of sand. Around them, the plain was clear, save numerous other dunes like the one that had piled up on top of the dugout.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Jimmy said as Dog came rushing past, shaking sand out of his fur. His tongue hung out as he panted happily at them.
“If we hadn’t been able to get that rock up,” Sarah said, shaking her head at the hole in the sand where the entrance was.
“Or if it had covered over the vent,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “Let’s get the horses and get this closed back off.”
“Nothing is ever gonna kill you, is it?” Sarah asked, following him back down into the smelly darkness and pulling the black horse, resisting as always, up through the sand and into the sun. She went back down to get more water, letting the horses drink their fill before giving Dog as much as he wanted.
“I’ll have to re-stock this,” she said, looking down into the dark space as Jimmy mounted.
“I can send someone, if you want.”
“Like you could give them directions,” she said.
“I’d do fine,” he said darkly, letting his horse pick a speed and heading in a vaguely-southern direction. Sarah mounted and followed, shaking her head as she brushed sand off her hat and put it on.
“Gonna be a lot of cleanup in town when we get back,” Sarah said. “Gotta have the place sparklin’ for your guests.”
“It can wait,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got the next thing, first.”
Sarah doubted he had a good grasp of just how much damage there was going to be in town, but he was right. They needed to get up to the mine.
Pete’s body was coming up out of the ground, and she was going to be there for it.
“What did you tell Thor about sendin’ him home?” Sarah asked.
“Told him that you wanted recovering Pete’s body to be private.”
“And no one asked how we knew where it was?”
Jimmy glanced at her.
“They told me that the stink is getting worse.”
Oh.
She turned her face away, gritting her teeth together until she had control of herself again.
“He deserves a proper burial,” she said.
“He does,” Jimmy said, not so much an agreement as being agreeable.
She looked up at the sun.
She figured they had about three hours before they’d lose light, and if they pushed hard, they might be able to get to somewhere the horses could forage at least a little bit overnight. Barring all of the scrub grass being buried in sand.
Too much to clean up and too little time.
“You Lawsons do nothin’ but cause trouble,” she said. Jimmy nodded, as if he’d been following her train of logic.
“Trouble and profit,” he said. “It’s the Lawson way.”
She sighed, looking up at the sun again from under her hat. A gust of wind nearly took the hat off her head, and she clamped a hand down on it.
“We need to pick up the pace if we’re going to make it off the flats by nightfall,” she said.
“I don’t think anyone’s objecting,” Jimmy said, looking down at Dog, who was jogging a zig-zag ahead of them, smelling sand for the sheer joy of having something new to smell.
“All right then,” Sarah said, giving the black horse some encouragement.
Too much to do.
Too little time.
––—
They made it to the edge of the flats before they called it a night, camping in the dark for lack of energy or interest to gather firewood. Jimmy didn’t have the right blankets for keeping as warm as Sarah did, but he wouldn’t freeze to death, so she let him be. The next morning, they started up into the mountains, getting to the mine by late afternoon.
“Where have you been?” Rich complained. “You were supposed to be here three days ago.”
“Detained,” Jimmy answered. “How are things going here?”
“We found him,” Wade said. “Just been waiting for you to bring him up.”
Wade glanced at Sarah, but as she dismounted and set the black horse loose, no one addressed her directly.
“How bad is it?” Jimmy asked.
“What do you think?” Rich asked. “She blew him up and then she dumped a mountain on top of him. We should have the workers doing this, not us.”
“There’s a bullet in that body, and I expect you to find it and put it in my hand,” Sarah said, adjusting her hat slightly. “After that, you can get anyone to do anything you like.”
“All this?” Wade asked Jimmy. “All of this so that she can cover up that she murdered him.”
“All of this because I say so,” Jimmy said. “That’s all.”
The twins grunted at each other and headed back for the mine. Thomas emerged.
“Oh, you finally made it,” he said cheerfully. “Anything bad?”
“Plenty,” Jimmy said, “but nothing worth mentioning.”
Thomas nodded. He looked at Sarah.
“I’m not sure I understand what you did, but I know you think you had to. We’ll get him home to his parents.”
She shook her head.
“We bury him up here.”
“Why?” Thomas asked. He looked at Jimmy, as if for permission that wasn’t quick in coming. He pressed on anyway. “I promise, there’s nothing that even looks like a bullet hole on him. There are only a few things that are really convincingly human.”
“Thomas,” Jimmy said. Thomas shrugged.
“Sorry. I just know I’d want to get him home, if he were my friend. And if it’s about how he died, there’s no way anyone could tell, at this point.”
Sarah didn’t answer. Nor did Jimmy. Thomas sighed.
“We’ve got a body bag down there already. I’m going to go help Rich and Wade get him loaded up.”
Sarah didn’t look at Jimmy as Thomas disappeared into the darkness.
“You thought about how you want to explain the fact that the entire length of the mine was collapsed?” Jimmy asked. “Thor will have recognized that it was blown up.”
“I’ll worry about Thor,” she said, watching the entrance to the mine. In her mind’s eye, she could imagine Pete coming up out of the darkness, bright smile and a quick wave for her, hat tip to Jimmy, then going on with his day, as he always did. Nothing ever stopped him, or even slowed him down. He was too cheerful to let things get to him.
But she had.
The last person he would have expected, she’d gotten to him in the end. Maybe it had been inevitable. He was going to get himself killed, spending all of his time around her. It hadn’t been the way she would have guessed, but she should have guessed, a
ll the same. His lifespan was destined to be short.
“I’m going to check on the rock they’ve been pulling out,” Jimmy said. “You want to join me?”
“I killed him,” she said.
“I know,” he answered. “You did what you thought you had to.”
“It didn’t make any difference,” she said. “You came back and blew everything up.”
“I got credible information that there was a fortune to be made here,” Jimmy said evenly.
“And that’s all that matters. The fact that the one guy who stuck by me through all of this is coming up out of the ground in pieces doesn’t matter to you at all, does it?”
“Do you want it to?” Jimmy asked.
“You bastard,” she said. “You Lawsons think that because you came back life here is starting again. We had lives here. We knew what to expect from them.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Dying young.”
“Bastard,” she said again. “What do you call what’s happening down in town, now? Who knows how many young men are dead because you put out the word that there was absenta here.”
“Everyone was going to know, anyway,” Jimmy said.
“You don’t know that,” Sarah said. “You don’t know that, if it weren’t for you paying the analyst off, anyone would have ever found out.”
“Are you looking for a way to blame me for you killing Pete?” he asked. “Because it isn’t going to work, even in your own head.”
“Shut the hell up, Lawson,” she said. “You bring death with you everywhere you go.”
“Because no one was dying here before I got here,” he answered.
“You know you make it worse. You always make everything worse.”
“The way it was wasn’t any good. I’m not going to apologize for changing it.”
“I killed him. He died so that Lawrence would survive. And then you show up and you kill Lawrence, anyway.”
“I don’t care about Lawrence,” he said. “Not the Lawrence you care about.”
“Bastard,” she said, aware that she was yelling now. She took her hat off and swiped it at him. “These are good people. They don’t deserve your machinations.”
“It’s interesting that who you really are, underneath everything, isn’t the person they know.”
She hit him.
Full, closed fist across the face.
“You may have been trying to defend them, but it failed,” he said. She hit him again, center of body mass, then again. She was screaming.
Someone pulled her back by her elbows, someone not as strong as she was. She shook them off and hit Jimmy again. He was grinning.
“You did it for nothing, Sarah. That boy died because you weren’t prepared to do what was necessary.”
Two more hits, and there were more hands on her, hauling her back and off of Jimmy.
“Let her go,” Jimmy ordered, wiping blood off his face. “Let her finish it.”
She shook off the hands again, raising a fist.
His hands never moved to defend himself.
He was baiting her.
The heat went out of it and she dropped her arms.
His eyes were merciless, stable, cool.
“Finish your work,” he said to the Lawsons behind her. Sarah and Jimmy faced each other, unmoving.
She was breathing hard.
“It had to be me,” he said after a minute, then turned away, wiping his arm across his face and smearing blood almost to his ear.
“Jimmy,” she said, pulling a handkerchief out of her pocket. He waved her off. “Jimmy,” she said again, more emphatically. “Don’t patronize me.”
He turned to face her and she gritted her teeth.
“Any more than you already done, anyway,” she said, holding up the handkerchief. He shrugged, and she went to get the canteen off the black horse, coming back and washing the streaks of blood off of his clean skin, then holding the cloth against his face until his nose stopped bleeding.
“Does this hurt?” she asked, pushing up rather more aggressively than she needed to.
“Do you mean did you break my nose?” he asked. “Yes, you did.”
She sighed.
“Let me set it.”
He pulled his face away.
“I’ll have Doc look at it when we get home.”
“You wait until you get back to the house, you’re gonna have blood pooling all over your face and you’re gonna meet with your investors lookin’ like I beat the tar out of you.”
“Didn’t you?” he asked, almost playful.
“Two, three good hits, tops,” she said. “Not that bad.”
He eventually let her look at his nose and get the cartilage lined up correctly again. She handed him the kerchief for his nose, then took a step away.
“I’m gonna go see to Pete, now,” she said. He shook his head.
“It’s done,” he said. “They’re coming back now.”
She turned to find Thomas, Rich, and Wade coming up a path with shovels.
“You okay, Jimmy?” Rich called.
“He’s down there, Sarah,” Thomas said. She brushed past the three of them, going down to find the fresh grave. They had to have had it dug already, just put Pete down into it and covered it back over while she was wailing on Jimmy. She dropped to a knee, resting her hat on the ground.
“You was a good friend, Pete. Through thick and thin, you stuck by me. You deserved better than this, but I done what I thought was right. I’m sorry.”
She waited to see if anything else occurred to her, or if she felt anything else, then stood to find Thomas waiting behind her. He held out his hand, fingers closed, and she extended her palm. He slid the bullet into her hand, letting her close her own fingers over it without looking at it. It was warm from Thomas’ hand, but it made her own skin cold.
That little bit of metal was what had ended Pete. On her orders. Without looking at Pete or Thomas, she threw the bullet out into the woods down slope, then went back up to the main mine. Rich and Wade were sitting on camp chairs looking sullen. Jimmy was going through the pile of ore outside of the mine entrance, holding a methane lamp down close.
“There’s some really good ore down here, already,” he said.
“Ought to be,” Thomas said. “The stuff Sarah blew up was top quality. We’ve been watching the diggers like hawks to make sure they don’t make off with any of it.”
Jimmy nodded.
“It’s why you were here. You have any of it carried back?”
“Couldn’t trust anyone,” Rich said.
“We should load up a couple hundred pounds of it to take back with us,” Jimmy said. “I want to see the mine.”
“Should let it air out a day,” Thomas said. “It’s worse down there than it’s been, yet.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“No time.”
“Plenty ‘a time,” Sarah said, looking at the sky. “We can’t make it back to Lawrence today, and it’s no better camping partway there than it is just stayin’ here tonight. What have y’all got for provisions?”
Thomas took Sarah down to the site they had staked out as their campsite while Jimmy continued to pick through the ore.
“You okay?” Thomas asked as he and Sarah got out of earshot of the others.
“Fine,” Sarah said. “I done what I done. No takin’ it back now.”
“Have you ever hit Jimmy before?” Thomas asked.
“I hit plenty of people before,” Sarah answered, then shot him a meaningful look. He pressed his mouth closed and nodded.
“The supplies are over here,” he said. “We’ve still got plenty of grain and food, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“The horses are tired out,” she said. “Need a good meal. Jimmy and I do, too, at that.”
“What happened to you two?” Thomas asked.
“Sand storm,” she answered. “Gonna be hell to dig out the town, from what we got.”
Thomas shook his head.
“We never would have known.”
“No,” she said. “This side of the mountains gets its own problems, but they ain’t the same, that’s for sure.”
She picked through the food in the supply tent, then started on a pot of tea. She handed Thomas a bag of grain.
“Can you see that the horses get a shot at this?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“Sure.”
She pulled out a camp chair and sat down, stirring the kettle of boiling water with a stick.
Damn Jimmy Lawson. He didn’t know what was best for her, and pushin’ her that far was just one more sign that he thought he was the one in charge, no matter what she did. She rubbed her fists absentmindedly, feeling the sore that would be there tomorrow, and stared into the water moodily.
She’d wanted to be here. Sure, he’d let her be here, but to take it from her like that.
Damn Jimmy Lawson.
––—
The Lawsons avoided talking to her for the rest of the evening. She brewed her tea in peace, and then she made a meal that she consumed in a tent by herself, going to bed when the sun went down rather than sitting out by the roaring fire the Lawsons built like she might have, another day. Jimmy was creating a pile of absenta ore to take back with them, as if nothing were wrong, as if today were just another day of work.
As if his brothers hadn’t just buried her only ally while she beat the tar out of him.
She got up with a clearer mind, touring the mine tunnel with the rest of the Lawsons and ignoring the place where the four of them stepped delicately around the stain on the floor. The methane lamp showed just as much absenta as Sarah remembered.
Jimmy whistled, low, soft, holding the lamp up and rotating it to get the blue glisten of the raw materials in the ore reflecting the light of the flame.
“I can just throw the rest of that junk out, can’t I?” Jimmy asked.
“Money is money,” Rich observed. “It’s all worth money, but this...”
“This is worth a fortune,” Wade said. “Are you sure we want to sell it?”
He meant the mine. It went without saying that someone had to ask whether they should just keep the claim for themselves.
“Absolutely,” Jimmy said, holding the lantern up higher. All the way down the tunnel, to where the cave in refuse hadn’t been cleared yet, the walls reflected blue. Sarah could see the mania in his eyes, but they both knew, they all knew, that it was foolishness, even in a mine of this quality. The men who extracted this ore were going to have to fight for it, tooth and nail, every single day, once the quality of the mine was actually confirmed.