by Chloe Garner
The Lawsons were down for the fighting, but the grinding work of bringing that absenta up out of the ground and subsequently to market was not their interest, as tempting as it might have been as they stood right in front of the wall of evidence that absenta was here.
“We could make so much money,” Rich said.
“Yes, but do you want to keep pulling rocks out of the ground for the rest of your life?” Jimmy asked.
“If they were worth this much,” Wade started.
“Maybe,” Rich finished.
“We’re going to show the investors this mine,” Jimmy said. “And then we’re going to auction it to the highest bidder. You know how much they’re going to pay for the right to come pull rocks out of the ground?”
His eyes and his words were at odds, but Sarah trusted the words more. The eyes were greedy, but the words were how he would feel once they were down the mountain, headed back to town.
“How much further does it go?” Jimmy asked. Sarah shook her head.
“Maybe another fifty feet,” she said. “Then it dead-ends. No clue how far the seam goes.”
He nodded.
“Good.”
He looked at his brothers.
“You guys keep working. Sarah or I will bring the workers back in a few days to help finish it out...”
“You think we can keep their mitts off this stuff?” Rich asked.
“It was getting hard, before,” Thomas agreed. “They know how much it’s worth, and that was before we got to the really good ore.”
“That’s your problem,” Jimmy said. “I want this mine set for company in eight days. No questions, no arguments. I don’t care how much stuff walks away in the meantime, but you should at least try to keep it from happening too much. Don’t let them think we’re weak.”
“We’re going to have to get extreme,” Wade said.
“Punishments,” Rich added. “Real ones.”
“You saw what Sarah did to Petey,” Jimmy said. The three of them glanced among themselves, and Jimmy frowned. “Right. You haven’t been home since that. Well, they’ll have heard what she did to Petey, and they’ll see what she did to me. You play that. Let them wonder, if that’s what we’re willing to do to each other, what will we do to them if they get out of line? Right? You manage it. I’ll be back up here with the investors in eight days.”
“Wait,” Wade said. “You’re leaving us up here?”
“Work to do,” Jimmy said, turning and heading up-mine again.
“I’ve got a wife waiting for me at home,” Rich said.
“So do I,” Wade added.
“So I can stay but you two shouldn’t have to?” Thomas asked.
“Well,” Wade said, as if it were obvious enough that he should have to say any more. Thomas shoved him.
“We’ve got too much work to do for you two to bail.”
“It’s not supposed to be our job,” Rich said.
“You just remember that, the next time you start thinking you might like to own a mine,” Jimmy said without turning to look back over his shoulder. Sarah smiled to herself.
Outside, they got the horses loaded quickly, taking Thomas’ horse as a pack animal for the sacks of ore, and started back down the mountainside before Wade or Rich picked up the pluck to argue again.
Dog ran along side, sniffing through the brush as they went, looking for rodents and varmints, coming back once with blood on his muzzle.
“Good dog,” she said. Jimmy didn’t address her, and she didn’t try to get him to talk to her. She didn’t want conversation any more than he did.
They made it back to the Lawson house by midafternoon, and Sarah left him, going into town to check the damage.
It was as bad as she might have imagined, with pieces of it being much worse.
The shops were buried up to mid-thigh with sand on the backsides, and while they’d dug a path into Granger’s, you couldn’t see the boardwalk for the dune of sand that had accumulated against it and the building. Sarah looked up at the sky, feeling the breeze of cool and damp as it breathed through town.
Rain.
It would be here tomorrow or the next day, most likely. Three days at the most.
They needed to get the laborers up out of town and into the mountains before the rain hit, so that they didn’t get bogged down in the muck. It would rain up in the mountains every day, the way it always did, but the clouds would be heavier, closer, and the rain would be thicker and wetter than the wet side was used to.
Then those clouds would hit the heat over Lawrence and the rest of the desert, and they’d just open up, like a hose pointed at a wall. All of that water would come rolling down the dry side of the mountains and across the desert plains, pushing a wall of sediment and dust in front of it, cleaning and watering the desert, but leaving true devastation wherever anything bigger than a man’s wrist was growing or standing. The cows needed to be up in the high country before the rains came, because they were dumb enough to wash away. Most families brought their important livestock and their horses into the houses, which were built to withstand most of the impact of such a flood.
This one would crush at least one homestead down to nothing. Sarah couldn’t predict which one, though she could pick the two or three most likely. The barns would need to be reclaimed. The fields, the ones that weren’t harvested by now - gremlin had six planting seasons a year - would be lost. The homesteaders knew that. They would cope. She might need to step in to help, in the worst case or two, but they would cope.
The flood of young men would not. She had little doubt they’d be digging corpses out of the snaking piles of red cement before everything was over, because at least some of the men would decide that it wasn’t that bad - it wasn’t even raining out! - and go out against all of the advice, just to prove how big their balls were.
Some of them would wash away and never be found.
Then there would be the unlucky ones. The ones who, not because they were stupid, but because they were in a bad spot, would end up in buildings that were washing away on a mudtide, in buildings that were breaking apart underneath them. Granger’s would stand. The tavern probably wouldn’t wash away again. But each of them were fitted with a poured-stone floor that wouldn’t break up, even if the foundations did give. They were that important, and Granger and Willie and Paulie were that well-equipped. They could ride out a surf, if they had to.
The other shops were not that luxurious, and when the men went in them to hide - and there was evidence that they had, indeed, broken into the abandoned shops for shelter during the sandstorm - they would be packed like smoked fish in a can when the little structures broke loose of each other and began to turn under the horizontal avalanche of mud.
Those would be the worst, potentially.
There would be the weeks’ worth of digging out, all of it needing to be done before the investors got there, and there would be the rebuilding that came after that, but finding the broken up buildings full of men who hadn’t had anywhere else to go... That would be the worst.
She shook her head at the piles of sand, then went in to Granger’s.
There were a few men there, shopping, some of whom she knew and others who were strangers. She approached Granger at his counter, pulling money out of her duster pocket.
“What’s my tab?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Isn’t one.”
“You been feedin’ the boys like I told you?” she asked. He picked his cloth up off the counter and took his spectacles off to clean them.
“Yes, they been eating about a barrel of gremlin a day. I’m interviewing for a baker.”
“Then what’s my tab?” she asked. He shook his head again, putting the spectacles back on.
“Jimmy paid it before you two set out,” he said. “Paid it upfront.”
“I said I’d cover it,” Sarah growled, unfolding bills. Granger shook his head, putting his hand on top of hers.
“Beggin’ your pardon, Mi
ss Todd, but I fear him a lot more than I fear you, on account of us knowin’ each other as long and as well as we do. And he told me if I took cash off of you for this, there’d be hell to pay.”
She sighed.
“I told you I’d pay for it. What business of his is that?”
Granger shrugged.
“He said the town owes you ‘nough, as it is. That it’s time for the Lawsons to carry some of that.”
“And he thinks that just layin’ out money is gonna do it,” she said.
“Didn’t say that,” Granger said, wiping his hands. “Didn’t say that a’tall.”
“No, I did,” Sarah answered. “You findin’ any good men for baking?”
“Not much, no, not muh,” Granger said. “They’s here for action. Standin’ at an oven all day long ain’t their idea of a good time.”
“They lined up ‘round the station four times to interview to pull rocks out of the ground,” Sarah said.
“Reckon they figure that’s what adventure looks like,” Granger said.
“Dumber’n dead trees,” Sarah said. “A job’s a job, and food is food.”
Granger nodded.
“I’ll find someone suitable, I got not doubt.”
She nodded, then slapped the counter.
“Jimmy gets behind payin’ you, you tell me. If he figures he can just walk in and bankroll somethin’ like this, I’ll see to it he does it right.”
Granger gave her a quick smile, then darted away as something heavy hit the floor behind her and began rolling. She glanced to see a man she didn’t know chasing after a sealed barrel, looking like a child. She shook her head again, putting her money away and heading back out to where she’d tied the horse. Dog was wandering up and down the street smelling things. She whistled to him and started off toward home.
There were things that she needed to get done before the rains came, just at home, and she wouldn’t have much time. Someone was going to have to lead the train of workers up into the mountains, and she didn’t think Jimmy had the direction down in his head, yet. She could talk Thomas through how to find it, with a map, but somehow the idea of trying to be that patient with Jimmy was just not going to happen.
She would need to make up another route, too. Too many times over the same route, and too many feet on the same path, and it got a lot easier for someone to make their way back up to the mine.
Probably with guns.
She got to the house and bathed, then started on the battening-down that needed to happen. She looked up to find Jimmy on the front porch.
“The rain is coming, isn’t it?” he asked. She nodded.
“Need to get the workers up into the mountains and get back ourselves before it gets here,” she said. “You got ‘em rounded up?”
“Working on it,” he said. “Petey is going with us.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Why?”
“I’m letting Wade come home, and we need three of them up there.”
Sarah shrugged.
“Your family.”
She was clearing out bits of debris that had accumulated in the gap between the house and the ground, smelling the air from time to time. It was dry most of the time, but the wet was there. The rain was on its way.
“I remember the rains being phenomenal,” Jimmy said, looking up at the clear sky. She nodded.
“Nothin’ to do but watch, back then,” she said. “You got someone treatin’ your house?”
“We don’t get much,” Jimmy said. “You remember.”
She did remember. The house, being on a foothill, was up above the water line by dozens of feet, even in the worst flash floods, so all it would get was the dump of water from above and the slide as it went by downhill to join the real flooding.
“Ought to, anyway,” she said. “Just in case. Too much sand around.”
“The staff dug all that out,” he said. She stood and raised an eyebrow at him.
“They what?”
“Shovels, apparently,” Jimmy said. “Just got rid of it.”
“That’s a mountain of work,” she said. He nodded.
“That’s why we have staff.”
She shook her head.
“Showin’ off, more like. Put a pile of sand at the bottom of the hill for everyone to see.”
He grinned.
“Works, doesn’t it?”
“S’pose.”
“I could send them over here,” he said, looking around. “Though it’s not going to do you anywhere near as much good, is it?”
She stood, putting her hands on her hips.
“No, I got an entire plain’s worth of stand comin’ at me. Shovelin’ out what’s under the house ain’t gonna do anything at all.”
“Why we continue to live down here, I’ll never know,” he said. “Should have moved the entire city up into the hills a generation ago.”
“Expensive to build up there,” Sarah said, “and hard to move stuff. All up and down hills. Flat’s good for everyone, till the water gets here.”
“I guess we’ve never been concerned with it, have we?” he asked. She shook her head.
“You ain’t concerned with most things normal folk spend their lives about.”
“I was including you, Sarah,” he said. She stood to look at him again, a long, evaluating look, then shook her head and went back to clearing.
“I ain’t one of you. I’m a Todd.”
“Don’t have to be,” he said.
Something about that was more than she had the ability to ignore. Something important in that. She looked at him, knowing he wouldn’t give away if it were a joke or not. His face, as always, was still, just watching hers.
“You ain’t funny, Lawson,” she said finally.
“I’m not trying to be.”
“You had Doc look at your nose yet?” she asked. He touched the swelling there gingerly.
“You did fine.”
“You don’t get him to put his stuff on it, you’ll have a scar there what tells the world I broke your nose.”
“I can always go to Preston and get it fixed, if I want,” Jimmy said. “I’m not afraid of you. I never have been.”
“Ain’t always been the smartest, either,” she said, stopping short of pointing out that he hadn’t even defended himself. She knew why he hadn’t.
“You didn’t answer me,” he said.
“You didn’t ask a question,” she told him, avoiding. He was watching her squirm, and it made her angry.
“I didn’t think I needed to,” he said. “You know.”
She stood, leaning on her shovel.
“Get to the point or go get the hoe out of the barn,” she said. “I ain’t workin’ here for your amusement.”
He kept his face, his eyes still, like a wolf. It made her queasy, deep in her stomach, in a way that she resented. She’d liked it once, that look. Hungry. Impulsive. Powerful. Quiet. His hands were in his pockets, and he might have been chewing a bit of straw, she wasn’t looking that hard. Straight hair hung down to his eyes. It needed to be trimmed, but he kept it in a tight range, even across his forehead.
Gray eyes.
“You don’t have to be a Todd for the rest of your life,” he finally said, the muscle in his jaw clenching.
“Still ain’t a question,” she answered.
“Is that really all you respond to?” he asked, the frustration seeping into his tone. “Force? Blunt, direct force?”
She didn’t answer immediately, and he came down off of the porch, purposefully, only taking his hands out of his pocket at the last moment as he reached to pull her face against his.
And froze.
To his credit, he didn’t move any more than he had to, and there was a ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth. She pushed harder with the knife, and he tipped his head up and back, leaving his hands on the back of her head, watching her out of the bottoms of his eyes, his eyelids drooping low.
“I didn’t know you still
carried those,” he said without moving his jaw.
“I been in this situation once or twice,” she said, lifting him up onto his toes. The blade was razor sharp, and there was something about your skin that knew that, that kept you absolutely still where the edge pushed against you.
“I ain’t your lapdog, Jimmy,” she said. “I won’t do your biddin’ just cause it’s you askin’.”
“I thought we meant more than that,” he said, finally easing his arms down, one of them finding her wrist. In a slow disentanglement, she let his heels drop and then he lowered his chin as the pressure from the knife abated.
“You have a steady hand,” he said. “I was always impressed by that.”
“You’ve got a steady nerve to match,” she answered. He tipped his head by way of acknowledging the compliment, stepping another stride back. She put the knife back away between her shoulderblades.
He watched her.
He was used to getting what he wanted.
Not because he’d been treated special or because someone else had made a way. Because he always managed to get what he wanted through force of will.
She knew this.
She had no intention of acknowledging what had happened, what it meant. Or that it drove a sense of tingling fear down to her knees. Bridges with Jimmy Lawson were hard to get. He didn’t have many. And she’d just put a knife to his throat.
“I’m going to check on the laborers,” he said. “Make sure they’re ready to head up tomorrow, early. We have a shipment of horses coming in, soon, so we won’t have to keep hiring them.”
“Good,” Sarah said.
He nodded, running a toe through the dirt as he turned. She expected he would say something before he left, though she had no idea what, but he didn’t. He went and got his horse from where it was foraging for dry grass up near the pathway, walking it out onto the road before mounting and riding away.
She watched for a long time, feeling like she’d lost her footing in a fight. A fight everyone else thought she was winning. She didn’t know what to make of it.