Old Earth

by Gary Grossman

  He could predict the routine and prepare for it. His graduate students would come in excited. They’d find what and who they had in common before deciding whom they’d befriend. They’d listen to him for a few days, then begin to think they know more. He’d settle them down. Some might think about leaving, but they’d all stay. They always did, because by the second or third week, they’d actually find something interesting and it would reinvigorate their sense of purpose.

  Hooking up usually hit week three. When partners changed in week five, an uncomfortable silence would fall over the camp. McCauley had the solution for that. A wild night at the bar; laughter, and talk about the sexual and mating habits of the dinosaurs. The detailed descriptions always brought laughter and obliterated the walls that had invariably gone up or the silos where they’d retreated.

  The rest of the term would become a pure joy of discovery, growth and understanding. No one returned to grad school the same. Friendships would be forged for life. In some cases, marriages.

  McCauley had seen it all over the years. He closed his eyes and focused on each of the students’ vitae. He believed that some would eventually make significant contributions to the field of study. Others could become more effective teachers because of the experience. And the remaining students? Still an enigma. They might give it all up or…he didn’t know.

  • • •

  London

  Colin Kavanaugh couldn’t sleep. He kept going over reports he’d recently read. Maybe there was information he hadn’t valued correctly. Damn the old man, he thought. He’s right. He vowed to go back, study everything and learn.

  Seven

  April 18, 1913

  Universal Colliery

  Senghenydd, Wales

  It could have been 1713, not 1913, for all that the Welsh town offered. Little had changed for the lives of the citizens except that now they worked in the mines. Since the discovery of coal in the late nineteenth century, the people of Senghenydd and its neighboring areas went to work underground extracting fifty-six million tons of coal each year.

  Like most small mining towns in the hills of Wales, Senghenydd was quaint and rural. Nothing bucolic or romantic. The people hungered for work, and the work made them hungry. And the work was grueling. That was life—chosen or inherited. Men were slaves to the bituminous coal, an unforgiving, dangerous employer. Women bore babies, prayed that their husbands would return for dinner, and fed them if they did.

  There was also God and country. God, country, and family, to be precise. Those were the tenets most people lived by and voted for. In that order. Their faith couldn’t be shaken, no matter how difficult the job was or how devastating a mine disaster might be. They would always return to God, country, and family. The order of things.

  The man who drove a 9.5 horsepower Standard Rhyl over the dirt roads through the Aber Valley to the mining office came to preserve such order.

  He was two inches taller than six feet, with a Roman square jaw, piercing blue eyes, and jet black, wavy hair. The man hid a muscular build inside a loose-fitting, already dusty gray jacket with matching pants. He knew right where to go. Past the engine and the machine houses. Past the sheds. Nearby was the tipple-tower, a skeletal iron structure that covered the mouth of shaft #1. Soon he’d take the lift down, but first he walked up the metal steps to the single-story, ramshackle field office. The flimsy spring-hinged door snapped shut behind him, creating a loud bang.

  “Mornin’,” he said.

  “Nothin’ good about it,” replied one of the two men in the room.

  The snarky remark came from the forty-five year old plump, balding, short, irascible company general manager lazily sitting in the far end of the room. Another man sat at a desk working, perhaps cooking the books. He offered no comment.

  “I didn’t say there was. Just ‘mornin.’ I’m Anthony Formichelli, Regional Inspector of Mines. Here to look at things.”

  The man in front stopped and looked up from charts he was going over. He established eye-contact with the visitor for a fleeting moment, then broke it off.

  “Go away,” bellowed the man from further back. You fuckin’ assholes were just here last week.”

  “He was scheduled,” Formichelli stated.

  “And he received ten pounds for doing nothing and going away. One hundred times a miner’s day wage.”

  “Yes. Well, I’m the unscheduled guy. And I’m here.”

  “Okay how much do you want? Twenty? Don’t you people ever think you’ve gotten enough?”

  “I’m not here to take your money, Mr. Dwyer? It is Mr. Dwyer?”

  “It is. Wilem Dwyer. If you’ve not come for sterling what are you here for?”

  “Mr. Dwyer, I’m here to examine a portion of your mine.”

  “You’re crazy. None of you guys ever really want to go down. That’s what the money’s for. So you don’t. Not today. Not ever.”

  “Today is different,” Formichelli said in an uncompromising voice.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because eighty-one died in 1901 and you had another disaster recently with nothing to show for it.”

  “Coal. We have coal to show for it. That’s what we do here. Dig coal out of the damn ground. We get our hands dirty. You guys do it by gratefully taking our payoffs.”

  “I didn’t come for a payoff. We’re going downstairs together.”

  Dwyer decided to be coy. “Look, I get it. You don’t want to take it in public. So we do it down there.”

  “We do what I need to do in your mine.”

  “For Christ’s sake, there’s nothing but coal. Fuckin’ tons of coal. Save yourself the trip. I’ll give you thirty-five!”

  “I’ll forget about your bribe so long as we go now. If you don’t, then I’ll see to it that you’ll never have the opportunity again. I’m sure someone else would be happy to become General Manager. Like…” Formichelli nodded to the man with his head in his papers, his inside contact he’d met only a week before.

  “Okay, okay. The main shaft good enough?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. I want to see your new excavation. I believe you call it Lloyd George, the new spur off Central Link.”

  “How?”

  Formichelli didn’t let him finish the question.

  “It’s my job to know.”

  “Look,” Dwyer argued as he reached into a till box. “I’ll give you forty-five. How about fifty-five? You go away richer than when you arrived. And alive.”

  Formichelli pushed his overcoat aside and revealed a sidearm. His hand went to the weapon. “You’ll take me all the way to Lloyd George. If you don’t…” he glanced over to the other man again. That’s where he left the thought.

  Dwyer’s number two stopped his work. His eyes darted nervously, but his reaction was unseen by his boss.

  “We’ve hardly broken through. Not much to see. Come back in two weeks. We’ll start all over,” Dwyer said, trying unsuccessfully to get rid of the visitor.

  “Today,” Formichelli replied. “Now.”

  Dwyer gave the stranger a long hard look. He was serious. Serious enough to kill.

  • • •

  The rickety mine shaft elevator started with a jolt.

  “Uncomfortable?” Dwyer observed.

  “Not at all.”

  Formichelli had been in coal elevators and deep into caverns, wells and caves throughout Europe and even in America. But Dwyer was right. The rides always gave him the willies.

  Through the patchwork metal roof he saw six motor-driven wires attached to the top of the cage. To the sides, guide rails ran the length of the shaft. They kept the car and counterweights from swaying during descending and ascending. It was the coal miner’s lifeline. Formichelli would have to trust it.

  “Just get us down in one piece,” he added.

  The ride took six minutes before the elevator stopped at the foot of the main shaft, Central Link. Like all the tunnels it was named after roads in Cardiff. Dwyer lifted the
bar to the elevator gate and said without an ounce of real concern, “Mind your head.” The overhead support beams were difficult to see in the spotty lamp light. “You can stand most of the way. But then again, you better be ready to duck some. How’s your back?”

  “The last thing you need to do is worry about me.”

  Dwyer was struck by the ominous tone.

  They followed the gradual slope downward. At the tunnel’s highest, they barely had a few inches of headroom. But it quickly got lower, much lower, making them crouch. That’s when they cut far left into the passageway called Lloyd George. The farther they walked, the narrower it got, sometimes barely wide enough for wheelbarrows.

  Formichelli had seen how tunnels branched off into networks of rooms where chronically coughing miners, as young as nine, dug, shoveled, and removed the coal by the light of dim electric bulbs, oil lamps, and brass Justrite carbide head lamps.

  This was the process every day except on Sundays. The Lord’s day.

  “Halfway,” Dwyer said after twelve minutes. “Need a break?”

  “No.”

  The breeze that had been at their backs from outside air pushing down the main shaft was now gone. The air was stale and full of coal dust. Formichelli wrapped a scarf around his nose and mouth. Dwyer didn’t.

  After another grueling six minutes they stopped at the end of the electric wing. They lit hand- held lamps now. “The rest of the way we’re on our hands and knees. Follow me.”

  The colliery’s chief led the way. Though miners hadn’t extracted any coal from the new vein yet, the air was still heavy with coal dust.

  “No other ventilation?” Formichelli asked.

  “No,” Dwyer said through a phlegm-filled cough. “You’ll feel some fresher air, though.”

  They continued another two minutes through the claustrophobic space, at times on all fours then upright again.

  “Here’s what you wanted to see,” Dwyer said with annoyance. He pointed to the far end of the excavation.

  “Where?”

  “There,” Dwyer said. He brought his lamp closer to the rock. But it wasn’t rock. It was a wall. But not a wall. A surface that was there, but wasn’t there. A black wall.

  “Some sort of metal,” Dwyer said trying to sound smart for the company man. “At first, we thought it was silver; a black silver. Now I don’t know. Gotta get some work crews down here. Fact of the matter is if it’s not coal, and we’re in the business of coal, then it’s not my job to figure it out.”

  But it did matter.

  “How’d you say you heard about this?” Dwyer said, now curious.

  “I didn’t.”

  Formichelli turned in a slow circle, finally settling on the blacker-than-black surface, about eight feet wide and more than ten feet tall. He touched it. Not a spec of dirt.

  “What do you think?” the miner asked. “Must have been buffed by millions of years of water, the way a waterfall polishes boulders,” Dwyer said.

  The visitor continued to glide his fingers along the metal where it met the rock.

  The mining manager had had enough. “Can we leave now?”

  Formichelli ignored him.

  “Like I said up above, no coal. Nothing.”

  It wasn’t nothing to Formichelli. He smiled. “Okay, I’ve seen enough. I can leave now.”

  The word I was different than we. Dwyer missed the distinction. He also missed seeing Formichelli remove a knife from his bag and raise it to neck level. Had Dwyer seen it, he wouldn’t have been able to defend himself.

  Dwyer died without knowing why. That was Formichelli’s way.

  Now the killer retraced his steps, stopping fifteen meters away. He set the first of the long fuses to the dynamite he’d carried into the tunnel. The length of the fuse would buy him fifteen minutes. On the way back to the lift he lit five more fuses at strategic points.

  It wouldn’t be the first coal mine explosion in Wales. The newspaper would report that the mine’s general manager had died on a survey. The probable cause: an explosion due to a faulty lamp station. Eventually the accident was all but forgotten because of another Universal Colliery explosion barely six months later. That event became the worst in the history of the British Isles. Anthony Formichelli also witnessed that first-hand.

  Eight

  New Haven, CT

  Late May

  “Insurance certificates are in the yellow file. State and park permits in the green. Your travel is in blue and emergency…”

  “I know, I know,” McCauley said.

  DeMeo grimaced. His boss still hadn’t made a final decision on the site, so the graduate teaching assistant had to clear two. That would be the next order of business. “Now please, doc, pay attention.”

  “I am.”

  It didn’t look like he was. The Yale paleontologist crisscrossed his office, throwing files of his own into a large Fed Ex box. “Keep going.”

  “The purple file has contacts for your students. Black is for emergencies. Brown has my trip info. I’ve emailed PDFs of everything so you should have it on your iPhone, iPad, and laptop.”

  DeMeo mastered organization years ago, a lesson learned at the foot of his mother, a school teacher. She told the young Peter DeMeo that everything comes down to collating and stapling. It was true then. It was true now.

  “Got it. Yellow, green, blue. You’re yellow, travel is blue, insurance permits green.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong. What about black?” DeMeo asked.

  “Black is the color of my true love’s hair,” McCauley said, citing the traditional Appalachian folk song

  “Wrong again. You have no true love. It’s emergency contacts. Actually, I’ll put it in a red folder. Just read the damn labels and you’ll be okay. And please, don’t call me.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “Thank you. Now, can we finally decide where the fuck you’re going given you’ve already lied to the department?”

  DeMeo laid out information on the remaining two sites. McCauley read the tab on the top file. Makoshika State Park History. He perused DeMeo’s extracts, though he didn’t have to. He’d passed on the site before. He thought it might be too touristy. But this year? Makoshika. The name called out to him. “Makoshika.”

  “Interesting translation,” DeMeo noted.

  “Yes. In the language of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota peoples, it means bad earth or pitiful earth.” He paused for thought. “Bad earth. Yes, bad earth. Maybe this is the year for bad earth.”

  He considered some of the bullet points in the packet.

  Largest of Montana’s state parks

  More than 11,000 acres

  Freshwater shale, sandstone; evidence of mineral rich groundwater

  Carbonized wood

  Interlaced coal

  Smooth agates and towering cap rocks

  Fossilized coral

  The file contained eerie photographs that could have been shot on an alien landscape except for the identifiable home grown vegetation that survived the bad earth. In one direction, knolls rose above the landscape. Another revealed a layered landscape with sedimentary rocks.

  The terrain changed with every view: north, south, east, west. Wind swept rock formations were punctuated by juniper trees and hearty pines. There were high cliffs and beyond them a rugged desert without all the color variants of other sites. Mostly gray.

  The pictures told the story of how erosion shaped the Makoshika geography for three hundred million years.

  McCauley saw evidence in the pictures of ancient humid jungles, former lakebeds, and violent seismic shifts that accelerated transformation of the region. But, there was one additional photograph in the file DeMeo had prepared. It made McCauley laugh.

  “Oh, this isn’t fair.”

  He held up the photograph of Cottonwood, the eighteen-hole golf course two miles from the center of Glendive, Montana.

  “It’s considered one of the toughest in the region,” DeMeo offered. “Intimida
ting. Ready for someone who’s up to the challenge.”

  “Makoshika.”

  “Good, because I already charged a summer club membership on your card.”

  “What if I’d chosen the other site?”

  “You wouldn’t. The golf course was the clincher.”

  “My man! Who’s the park director?”

  “A guy named Jim Kaplan, Kaplan with a ‘K.’ I’ve checked him out. Forty-eight, married, with twin daughters. I think you’ll like him. Nothing major published, but he knows his park and he’s done his share of digs in the region. University of Kansas grad.”

  “Does he golf?”

  “Now that I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yup. Are you ready for your radio interview tonight?”

  “Christ, thank you! I forgot. What time?”

  “One in the morning. Set your alarm, doc.”

  Nine

  That night

  1:00 am

  The news ended. The theme music came up and the late night talk host welcomed listeners to the second hour of his Saturday night broadcast over Boston’s fifty thousand-watt powerhouse radio station, WBZ.

  “We’re back and I have one of my favorite guests on the phone, Dr. Quinn McCauley. He’s a leading paleontologist, first from Harvard, now Yale. I’ll forgive him for leaving as long as he keeps visiting us. Dare I say, he digs the earth. He actually digs the earth for dinosaur fossils. Every year, he heads out west in search of new discoveries. So pleased you’re joining us tonight. How are you, Dr. McCauley?”

  “Absolutely fine, thanks, Jordan. Great to be back. But please, it’s Quinn.”

  McCauley had never actually met Jordan Rich, the venerable late night host. These were call-in interviews. Promotion in pajamas. Though it didn’t count toward McCauley’s scholarly publishing, the exposure on WBZ reached listeners in thirty-three states. The bragging rights were enormous. But so was the enthusiasm of the overnight audiences, who McCauley had no problem holding in awe for hours.