by Stephen King
Anyway, Little Brother pulled his Daddy right up the trailer steps, and I heard him say, “Knock, Daddy, there’s someone home, I know there is.” Dad looked surprised as heck at that, although I didn’t know why, since my car was parked right out front, “big as Billy be damned.” I soon found out it wasn’t what the little tyke was saying but that he was saying anything at all!
Father looked around at the rest of his clan, and all of them said the same thing, knock on the door, knock on the door, go on and knock on the door! Excited as hell. Sort of funny and cute, too. I was curious, I’ll freely admit it. I could see their license plate, and just couldn’t figure what a family from Ohio was doing way the hell and gone out in Desperation on a Sunday afternoon. If Dad hadn’t got up nerve enough to knock, I was going to go out myself and pass the time of day with him. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back,” you know!
But he knocked, all right, and as soon as I opened the door, the little tyke went running in right past me! Right over to the wall he went, to the same bulletin board where Sally put up Mrs. Wyler’s letter when it came in, marking it CAN ANYONE HELP THIS LADY in big red-ink letters.
The tyke tapped the aerial photographs of the China Pit we kept tacked on the bulletin board, one after the other. Maybe you had to be there to understand how strange it was, but take my word for it. It was like he’d been in the office a dozen times before.
“Here it is, Daddy!” he said, tapping his way around those pictures. “Here it is! Here it is! Here’s the mine, the silver mine!”
“Well,” I said, kind of laughing, “it’s copper, sonny, but I guess that’s close enough.”
Mr. Garin gave me a red-faced look and said, “I’m sorry, we don’t mean to barge in.” Then he barged in himself and grabbed his little boy up. I was some amused. Couldn’t help but be.
He carried the tyke back out to the steps, where he must have thought they belonged. Being from Ohio, I don’t guess he knew we take barging around pretty much for granted out in Nevada. The tyke didn’t kick or have a tantrum, but his eyes never left those photos on the bulletin board. He looked as cute as a papoose, peeking over his Daddy’s shoulder with his little bright eyes. The rest of the family clustered around down below, staring up. The bigger kids were near bursting with excitement, and Mom looked pretty much in the same emotions.
Father said they were from Toledo, then introduced himself, his wife, and the two big kids. “And this is Seth,” he finished up. “Seth is a special child.”
“Why, I thought they were all special,” I said, and stuck out my hand. “Put ’er there, Seth; I’m Allen Symes.” He shook with me right smart. The rest of the family looked flabbergasted, his Dad in particular, although I couldn’t see why. My own Dad taught me to shake hands when I was just three; it’s not hard, like learning to juggle or floating aces up to the top of the deck. But things got clearer to me before long.
“Seth wants to know if he can see the mountain,” Mr. Garin says, and pointed at the China Pit. The north face does look a little like a mountain. “I think he actually means the mine—”
“Yes!” the tyke says. “The mine: Seth want to see the mine! Seth want to see the silver mine! Hoss! Little Joe! Adam! Hop Sing!”
I busted out laughing at that, it’d been so long since I’d heard those names, but the rest of ’em didn’t. They just went on looking at that little boy like he was Jesus teaching the elders in the temple.
“Well,” I says, “if you want to look at the Ponderosa Ranch, son, I believe you can, although it’s a good way west of here. And there’s mine-tours, too, some where they ride you right underground in a real ore gondola. The best is probably the Betty Carr, in Fallon. There’s no tours of the China Pit, though. It’s a working mine, and not as interesting as the old gold and silver shafts. Yonder wall that looks like a mountain to you is nothing but one side of a big hole in the ground.”
“He won’t follow much of what you’re saying, Mr. Symes,” his big brother said. “He’s a good brother, but he’s not very swift.” And he tapped the side of his head.
The tyke did get it, though, as was easy to see because he started to cry. Not all loud and spoiled, but soft, like a kid does when he’s lost something he really likes. The rest of them looked all downcast when they heard it, like the family dog had died. The little girl even said something about how Seth never cried. Made me feel more curious than ever. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with them, and it was giving me a hell of an itch. Now I wish I’d just let it go, but I didn’t.
Mr. Garin asked if he could talk to me private for a minute or two, and I said sure. He handed off the tyke to his wife—the boy still crying in that soft way, big tears just rolling down his cheeks, and I’ll be damned if Big Sister wasn’t starting to dribble a little bit right along with him. Then Garin came inside the trailer and shut the door.
He told me a lot about little Seth Garin in a short time, but the most important thing was how much they all loved him. Not that Garin ever came out and said so in words (that I might not have trusted, anyway). It just showed. He said that Seth was autistic, hardly ever said a single word you could understand or showed much interest in “ordinary life,” but that when he caught sight of the north wall of China Pit from the road, he started to gabble like crazy, pointing at it the whole time.
“At first we just humored him and kept on driving,” Garin said. “Usually Seth’s quiet, but he does go off on one of these babbling fits every now and then. June calls them his sermons. But then, when he saw we weren’t turning around or even slowing down, he started to talk. Not just words but sentences. “Go back, please, Seth want to see mine, Seth want to see Hoss and Adam and Little Joe.”
I know a little about autism; my best friend has a brother in Sierra Four, the state mental facility in Boulder City (outside of Vegas). I have been there with him on several occasions, have seen the autistic at first hand, and am not sure I would’ve believed what Garin was telling me if I hadn’t seen some of it for myself. A lot of the folks in Sierra not only don’t speak, they don’t even move. The worst ones look dead, their eyes glazed, their chests hardly going up and down so you can see.
“He loves Western movies and TV shows,” Mr. Garin said, “and all I can figure is that the pit-wall reminds him of something he must have seen on an episode of Bonanza.”
I thought maybe he had even seen it in an episode of Bonanza, although I don’t recall telling Garin that. A lot of those old TV shows filmed scenic footage (what they call “second unit”) out this way, and the China Pit has been in existence since ’57, so it’s possible.
“Anyway,” he said, “this is a major breakthrough for Seth—except the word that really fits is miracle. Him talking like he is isn’t all of it, either.”
“Yes,” I said, “he’s really in the world for a change, isn’t he?”
I was thinking of the people in Lacota Hall, where my friend’s brother is. Those folks were never in the world. Even when they were crying or laughing or making other noises, it was like they were phoning it in.
“Yes, he is,” Garin says. “It’s like a bank of lights went on inside him. I don’t know what did it and I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but . . . is there any way at all you could take us up to the mining operation, Mr. Symes? I know you’re not supposed to, and I bet your insurance company would have a fit if they found out, but it would mean so much to Seth. It would mean so much to all of us. We’ re on kind of a tight budget, but I could give you forty dollars for your time.”
“I wouldn’t do it for four hundred,” I said. “This kind of thing a man does for free or he doesn’t do at all. Come on. we’ll take one of the ATVS. Your older boy can drive it, if you don’t have any objections. That’s against company regs, too, but might as well be hung for a goat as a lamb, I guess.”
Anyone who’s reading this and maybe judging me for a fool (a reckless fool, at that), I only wish you could have seen the w
ay Bill Garin’s face lit up. I’m sorry as hell for what happened to him and the others in California—which I only know about from his sister’s letter—but believe me when I say that he was happy on that day, and I’m glad I had a chance to make him so.
We had ourselves quite an afternoon even before our “little scare.” Garin did let his older boy, John, drive us out to the pit-wall, and was he excited? I almost think young Jack Garin would have voted me for God, if I’d been running for the job. They were a nice family, and devoted to the little boy. The whole tribe of them. I guess it was pretty amazing for him to just start up talking like he did, but how many people would change all their plans because of a thing like that, right on the spur of the moment, even so? These folks did, and without so much as a word of argument among them, so far as I could tell.
The tyke jabbered all the way out to the pit, a mile a minute. A lot was gibberish, but not all. He kept talking about the characters on Bonanza, and the Ponderosa, and outlaws, and the silver mines. Some cartoon show was on his mind, too. Motor Cops, I think it was. He showed me an action figure from the show, a lady with red hair and a blaster that he could take out of her holster and kind of stick in her hand. Also, he kept patting the ATV and calling it “the Justice Wagon.” Then Jack’d kind of puff up behind the wheel (he must have been driving all of ten miles an hour) and say, “Yeah, and I’m Colonel Henry. Warning, Force Corridor dead ahead!” And they’ d all laugh. Me too, because by then I was as swept up in the excitement of it as the rest of them.
I was excited enough so that one of the things he was saying didn’t really hit home until later on. He kept talking about “the old mine.” If I thought anything about that, I guess I thought it was something out of some Bonanza show. It never crossed my mind to think he was talking about Rattlesnake Number One, because he couldn’t know about it! Even the people in Desperation didn’t know we’d uncovered it while blasting just the week before. Hell, that’s why I had so much paperwork to “rassle” with on a Sunday afternoon, writing a report to the home office about what we’d uncovered and listing different ideas on how to handle it.
When the idea that Seth Garin was talking about Rattlesnake Number One did occur to me, I remembered how he’d come running into the office trailer as if he’d been there a million times before. Right across to the photos on the bulletin board he went. That gave me a chill, but there was something else, something I saw after the Garin family had gone on its way to Carson, that gave me an even colder one. I’ll get to it in a bit.
When we got to the foot of the embankment, I swapped seats with Jack and drove us up the equipment road, which is all nicely graveled and wider than some interstates. We crossed the top and went down the far side. They all oohed and aahed, and I guess it is a little more than just a hole in the ground. The pit is almost a thousand feet at its deepest, and cuts through layers of rock that go back all the way to the Paleozoic Era, three hundred and twenty-five million years ago. Some layers of the porphyry are very beautiful, being crammed with sparkly purple and green crystals we call “skarn garnets.” From the top, the earth-moving equipment on the pit floor looks the size of toys. Mrs. Garin made a joke about how she didn’t like heights and might have to throw up, but you know, it’s not such a joke at that. Some people do throw up when they come over the edge and see the drop inside!
Then the little girl (sorry, can’t remember her name, might have been Louise) pointed over across, down by the pit-floor, and said, “What’s that hole with all the yellow tapes around it? It looks like a big black eye.”
“That’s our find of the year,” I said. “Something so big it’s still a dead secret. I’ll tell you if you can keep it one awhile longer. You will, won’t you? I might get in trouble with my company otherwise.”
They promised, and I thought telling them was safe enough, them being through-travellers and all. Also, I thought the little boy would like to hear about it, him being so crazy about Bonanza and all. And, as I said, it never crossed my mind until later to think he already knew about it. Why would it, for God’s sake?
“That’s the old Rattlesnake Number One,” I said. “At least, that’s what we think it is. We uncovered it while we were blasting. The front part of the Rattlesnake caved in back in 1858.”
Jack Garin wanted to know what was inside. I said we didn’t know, no one had been in there on account of the MSHA regulations. Mrs. Garin (June) wanted to know if the company would be exploring it later, and I said maybe, if we could get the right permits. I didn’t tell them any lies, but I did skirt the truth a bit. We’d gotten up the keep-out tapes like MSHA says to do, all right, but that didn’t mean MSHA knew about our find. We uncovered it purely by accident—shot off a blast-pattern pretty much like any other and when the spill stopped rolling and the dust settled, there it was—but no one in the company was sure if it was the kind of accident we wanted to publicize.
There would have been some powerful interest if news of it got out, that’s for sure. According to the stories, forty or fifty Chinese were sealed up inside when the mine caved in, and if so, they’d still be there, preserved like mummies in an Egyptian pyramid. The history buffs would’ve had a field day with just their clothing and mining gear, let alone the bodies themselves. Most of us on-site were pretty interested, too, but we couldn’t do much exploring without wholehearted approval from the Deep Earth brass in Phoenix, and there wasn’t anyone I worked with who thought we’d get it. Deep Earth is not a nonprofit organization, as I’m sure anyone reading this will understand, and mining, especially in this day and age, is a high-risk operation. China Pit had only been turning a profit since 1992 or so, and the people who work there never get up in the morning completely sure they’ll still have a job when they get to the work-site. Much is dependent on the per-pound price of copper (leachbed mining is not cheap), but even more has to do with the environmental issues. Things are a little better lately, the current crop of pols has at least some sense, but there are still something like a dozen “injunctive suits” pending in the county or Federal courts, filed by people (mostly the “greens”) who want to shut us down. There were a lot of people—including myself, I might as well say—who didn’t think the top execs would want to add to those problems by shouting to the world that we’d found an old mine site, probably of great historical interest. As Yvonne Bateman, an engineer pal of mine, said just after the round of blast-field shots uncovered the hole, “It would be just like the tree-huggers to try and get the whole pit designated a historical landmark, either by the Feds or by the Nevada Historical Commission. It might be the way to stop us for good that they are always looking for.” You can call that attitude paranoid if you want (plenty do), but when a fellow like me knows there are 90 or 100 men depending on the mine to keep their families fed, it changes your perspective and makes you cautious.
The daughter (Louise?) said it looked spooky to her, and I said it did to me, too. She asked if I’d go in it on a dare and I said no way. She asked if I was afraid of ghosts and I said no, of cave-ins. It’s amazing that any of the shaft was still up. They drove it straight into hornfels and crystal rhyolite—leftovers from the volcanic event that emptied the Great Basin—and that’s pretty shaky stuff even when you’re not shooting off ANFO charges all over the place. I told her I wouldn’t go in there even on a double dare unless and until it was shored up with concrete and steel every five feet. Never knowing I’d be in there so deep I couldn’t see the sun before the day was over!
I took them to the field office and got them hard-hats, then took them out and showed them all around—diggings, tailings, leachbeds, sorters, and heavy equipment. We had quite a field-trip for ourselves. Little Seth had pretty much quit talking then, but his eyes were as bright as the garnets we are always finding in the spoil-rock!
All right, I’ve come to the “little scare” that has caused me so many doubts and bad dreams (not to mention a bad case of conscience, no joke for a Mormon who takes the religion stuff pretty
seriously). And it didn’t seem so “little” to any of us at the time, and doesn’t to me now, if I’m to tell the truth. I have been over it and over it in my mind, and while I was in Peru (which is where I was, looking at bauxite deposits, when Audrey Wyler’s letter of inquiry came in to the Deep Earth post box in Desperation), I dreamed of it a dozen or more times. Because of the heat, maybe. It was hot inside the Rattlesnake Mine. I have been in a lot of shaft-mines in my time, and usually they are chilly or downright cold. I have read that some of the deep gold mines in S. Africa are warm, but I have never been in any of those. And this wasn’t warm but hot. Humid, too, like in a greenhouse.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I don’t want to do that. What I want is to tell it straight through, end to end, and thank God nothing like it will ever happen again. In early August, not two weeks after all this happened, the whole works collapsed. Maybe there was a little temblor deep down in the Devonian, or maybe the open air had a corrosive effect on the exposed support timbers. I’ll never know for sure, but down it came, a million tons of shale and schist and limestone. When I think how close Mr. Garin and his little boy came to being under all that when it went (not to mention Mr. Allen Symes, Geologist Extraordinaire), I get the willies.
The older boy, Jack, wanted to see Mo, our biggest digger. She runs on treads and works the inner slopes, mostly digging out benches at fifty-foot intervals. There was a time in the early ’70s when Mo was the biggest digger on Planet Earth, and most kids—the boys especially—are fascinated with her. Big boys too! Garin wanted to see her “close up” as much as young Jack did, and I assumed Seth would feel the same way. I was wrong about that, though.
I showed them the ladder that goes up Mo’s side to the operator’s cab, which is almost 100 feet above the ground. Jack asked if they could go up and I said no, that was too dangerous, but they could take a stroll on the treads if they wanted. Doing that is quite an experience, each tread being as wide as a city street and each of the separate steel plates that make them up a yard across. Mr. Garin put Seth down, and they climbed up the ladder to Mo’s treads. I climbed up behind them, hoping like mad nobody would fall. If they did, I was the one who’d most likely be on the hook in case of a lawsuit. June Garin stood back aways so she could take pictures of us standing up there with our arms around each other, laughing. We were clowning and mugging for the camera and having the time of our lives until the little girl called, “You come back, Seth! Right now! You shouldn’t be way over there!”