Big Maria

by Johnny Shaw

  The three men didn’t try to escape the rain. They sat it out uncovered for the twenty minutes of its fury. Now soaking wet, they wandered around the strange circular valley with the high canyon walls.

  “I don’t know, but it’s here,” Harry said, frustration in his voice. Not the first or even fifth time the question had been asked and answered.

  “Shouldn’t there be an opening, a door, maybe a sign? If the mine is here, wouldn’t there be—I don’t know—a mine?”

  “This isn’t some riddle, Frank. I’m not screwing with you. It’s old. It’s hidden or buried or something. But according to everything, all my research, all the reading, it’s here. Or around here.”

  “Is it here or around here?”

  Harry looked up from the damaged GPS unit that he had been attempting to repair and stared at Frank. “How do I explain better than ‘I don’t know’?”

  Ricky looked at the walls of the valley, ignoring the two men. He spoke as much to himself as Harry and Frank. “It looks like a crater. Where we’re at. Not like a natural valley, but a crater. Like on the moon.”

  Harry and Frank stopped what they were doing and looked at the walls. They craned their necks taking in the circular, crateresque shape of the depression.

  Ricky continued. “Maybe this is an old crater, like one that was made billions of years ago, like by the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.”

  “Wait a second. You believe in dinosaurs?” Harry asked.

  “Sure, who doesn’t?” Ricky said.

  “But you can’t believe in both God and dinosaurs,” Harry said.

  “Why not?”

  Frank broke in. “Considering that we’re standing in a military test range, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this crater was made by a missile of some kind. Which means it wasn’t here when the mine was here. It was made after the mine was abandoned. The Army blew up your goddamn mine, Harry.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Harry threw the GPS unit onto the ground. “When are you going to finally trust me? We made it this far, and I’m still riding the high of being alive. We crossed a minefield, a fake city at war, and an artillery barrage, and we lived. We should’ve died last night, the day before, and the day before that. All of us. But not one of us did. What are the odds? We’ve been tested and tested and tested. This is our ninth life. Not the time to quit. That gold is here and it is ours.

  “Maybe a missile made this crater. It’d be like the government to screw us without us knowing it. And maybe the mine entrance was here and now it ain’t. Means the entrance is gone. Don’t mean the mine is gone or the tunnels got filled up. If we’re standing on the mine, then we’re standing on the gold. Mines don’t go side to side, they go down. We want that gold, we dig.”

  Frank shrugged and walked away, but that was enough for Ricky. He nodded and pulled a shovel from the burro’s pack.

  Four hours later, the three men were tired beyond the limits of exhaustion and in the worst moods of their lives. Which was a real milestone, considering that their lives hadn’t exactly been all rainbows and blow jobs to that point.

  That’s what four hours of digging hardpack and rock will do. Digging a hole to find another hole and finding nothing. Not even a clue to make more digging seem worth it. Each muscle ache ripped at what little faith each man had left. They had been beaten and battered and had asked for more, but gotten a whole lot of nothing in return.

  The artillery started up to the west. Far enough that they were confident that they were at a safe distance, but close enough to make them wince with each explosion. The ground shuddered, and their memories of the night came back with each strike.

  The interior of the crater was roughly fifty yards in diameter. Each man picked a spot and dug. After an arbitrary depth, the digger moved on and tried another random spot. After four hours, the area looked like a battle zone, foxholes spotting the landscape. The burro watched curiously, sniffing between holes for anything edible. It licked at pebbles but let them fall off its tongue.

  Frank had stopped digging an hour earlier. He lay on his back in the bottom of one of the holes. The damp soil felt good, but he couldn’t help feel like he was lying in a grave. Even through the exhaustion, it was hard to be at ease when someone could cover you with dirt at any moment. When he saw Ricky standing over him, his heart skipped a beat.

  “Jesus, Ricky.”

  “Didn’t mean to scare you. Had to talk. What’re we doing here? We going to keep digging until we can’t dig no more?”

  “I’m already there. I got the heart to dig, but not the heart.”

  “You need water.”

  Ricky handed Frank a canteen. He glanced over to Harry, who was digging feverishly. His form was awful, but his frantic enthusiasm made up for it. He dug like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon ran.

  After Frank took a drink, he said, “Harry believes that as long as he keeps forward, he’ll reach the finish line. But everything isn’t always in front of us. You can only pound your head into the same wall so many times. Sometimes forward ain’t nothing but an empty hole.”

  Ricky shrugged. “We made it here. It feels really close, you know?”

  “You’re right. Don’t listen to me. What do we got to lose? I’m just tired, kid. Don’t mean to be the voice of shit.”

  “I’ve been praying. We’ll find that gold.”

  “You prayed for gold. What does God think about that?”

  “I prayed for my family. The gold is part of that.”

  “A small part.”

  “Hey!” It was Harry.

  Ricky turned and Frank sat up, peeking over the edge of his hole. Harry’s head and shoulders were visible from the top of the four-foot-deep hole on the other end. He was waving frantically.

  “I think I found something. The ground is different here. Like the soil’s darker or—it’s just different.”

  The burro wandered near Harry, sniffing and kicking at the pebbles near the hole.

  “Might be nothing.”

  Then the burro disappeared. Ricky had been watching the burro as it walked by Harry, and then it was gone. In a cloud of dust. Poof. Running it back in his mind, the animal hadn’t so much disappeared as dropped. Like the ground swallowed it up.

  The three men stared in silence at the spot where the burro had been. The only sound, pebbles and rocks clacking together. And then a thud and a loud bray.

  Harry turned to Ricky and gave him the saddest look Ricky had ever seen. “That’s not good,” Harry said.

  And then he disappeared, too.

  FIFTY

  All Harry could see was nothing. Darkness surrounded him. He hadn’t lost consciousness, but the blackness didn’t quite convince him that he was awake either. The fall had been a jolt of intense confusion that felt like he had been spit into outer space. For a terrifying couple of seconds, he thought he was blind. The relief was monumental when he finally looked up and saw the light from the holes thirty feet above him. The holes that he and the burro had fallen through.

  The walls of the pit had slowed his drop as he careened down the narrow channel. His landing had been unexpectedly soft. It hurt, but he had been surprised at the amount of give. There was an advantage to a life of misery, at least when it came to pain. He had absorbed worse many times before.

  It took him a minute to gather that he had landed on top of the burro, the animal breaking the majority of his fall. Harry’s still-healing leg stung from where his heel had hit the hard surface of wherever the hell he was. That leg was never going to heal right.

  A voice shouted from above. “Harry!” It was Ricky. “You okay?”

  The kid sounded frantic. But Harry would probably be a little freaked too if someone just disappeared. Someone and a burro. Standing there all lah-di-dah, then like a crummy magic trick, presto and gone.

  Harry saw the silhouette of Ricky’s head above him. It made the opening look like a cartoon eye.

  “I’m alive,” Harry yelled through some
pain. “Better be careful. Else you’ll be down here with me.”

  “You hurt?”

  “Don’t fall in, kid. Seriously. You’ll land on me.”

  “I’m on my belly. Frank’s got hold of my foot. It feels stable where I’m at. You hit like a tunnel that was covered up.”

  Frank laughed. “I always get the shaft.”

  “I’ll take it from the lame joke that you’re okay.”

  “I don’t feel too hurt. Unless it’s one of those internal spleenrelated injuries that kills you two days later.”

  He pressed a hand against the belly of the burro, pushing himself up to see how well he moved. He stopped and held his hand against the coarse hair, feeling its stillness. “Think the donkey’s dead. I don’t hear or feel no breathing. I landed on him. He’s warm. If he ain’t dead, he’s super messed up.”

  “There should be a flashlight in its pack. Or a lantern, if it ain’t got broke. Maybe, hopefully some rope.”

  Harry rolled onto his stomach and climbed the side of the donkey, feeling for the heavy bundles. He ran his fingers over the animal’s body, trying to figure front from back and top from bottom. His hand finally found the canvas of the pack and dug inside. He dug through clothes, candy bars, and Abraham Constance’s head. Eventually his fingers wrapped around the familiar cylinder of a flashlight.

  The light hurt his eyes, and the first thing Harry saw was the twisted neck and grotesque expression of the poor, definitely dead burro. An unexpectedly high-pitched noise leaped from Harry’s mouth. He had a new image for his nightmares. The burro’s tongue sagged between its blocky teeth. The animal’s eyes stared glassy and empty and sad.

  Harry pointed the light in the other direction.

  “What do you see?” Ricky asked.

  Harry broke out laughing. “I told you I’d find the mine. Harry Schmittberger delivers.”

  “We really found it,” Ricky said through a laugh of his own.

  “The mine, not the gold.” Frank didn’t mean to be negative, but he was tired and felt like hell. His skin crawled in an odd way and his hands buzzed. He was ready for a bed and a shower and a meal.

  The two of them sat in the shade with their backs to the wall of the crater. They both stared at the hole. The sun had dipped lower in the sky, the cooling air pleasant.

  “Every step, we get closer,” Ricky said. “Don’t matter the next screwed-up thing that happens.”

  “But there’s always something. Notice that. We’re at the mine, for all the good it does. We can’t get down there. Harry can’t get up. The burros are dead. Even if we find the gold, how are we going to carry it?”

  “Just another obstacle. I don’t know how to get down there or get Harry up. That’s a tricky one, but we’ll figure it out. The supplies are in the burro’s pack. Most of the water and food, too. We don’t figure it, we’re as screwed as Harry. I tried having him throw supplies up, but it’s too far for him. The guy’s got an arm like a girl. He couldn’t get a water bottle even halfway. He’s got the rope, too.” Ricky stood and paced.

  “Maybe the tunnels, the mine shafts lead to a way out,” Frank said.

  “Harry wandering in the dark? Last thing we need is for him to get lost. Or hurt. How stable is the rest of the mine, right?”

  Frank stared at his shoes, smiled, and asked, “How far down is it, did you say?”

  “I don’t know. About twenty-five feet. Maybe a little more.”

  “I got an idea. Hope you’re not shy.”

  Pain shot up Harry’s leg. He put more weight on it. Harry wasn’t going to let something as ordinary as a not-quite-healed broken leg stop him. His curiosity and greed drove him forward. It wasn’t about getting out of the mine. It was about finding the gold. If he found it and died, at least he’d end on a victory. The next sucker would find his smiling skeleton guarding the hidden treasure. Although, how can you tell if a skeleton is smiling?

  He took delicate steps down the mine shaft, throwing the light from the flashlight in front of him.

  Timber supports were visible every six feet, some in better condition than others. He could see areas of the tunnel that had partially caved in, rocks forming in piles. At the end of the visible light in one direction, it looked like it might be completely blocked. The more Harry studied the condition of the construction, the more the possibility of complete collapse loomed. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to explore.

  “Harry! You there?” Ricky’s voice shouted from above.

  “Where am I going to go?”

  “I’m dropping down a line. Tie the rope to it and I’ll draw it back up.”

  “I didn’t think you had anything that’d reach.”

  “We figured it out.”

  Ricky and Frank stood in their underwear and laceless shoes. They double-checked the knots on the makeshift line made from their clothes, socks, belts, a handkerchief, and shoelaces. They had discussed tearing the clothes into strips but decided that should only serve as a last resort. They couldn’t remember which burro had carried their extra clothes. Nobody wants to be stuck in an artillery range in only their tighty-whiteys.

  “Think it’ll reach?” Frank said.

  “We can get a couple more feet with our underpants if we need it.”

  Frank looked down at the sagging elastic of his underwear. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Ricky got on his belly and snake-crawled to the edge of the hole. Frank stayed behind on his hands and knees, feeding their clothes-rope one foot at a time. Ricky dropped the end into the hole, guiding it down. It grazed the side of the narrow shaft, dropping dust and pebbles into Harry’s face. Harry shook the dust off, holding his hands up for the line.

  “Can you see it, Harry?” Ricky said.

  “Another ten feet.”

  Ricky looked back at the other end. They looked like they were going to have enough.

  “You naked up there? I knew you guys partied.”

  “We got our underwears on,” Ricky said.

  “Sure you do,” Harry said with a laugh.

  Ricky felt a tug on the line and gripped down on the leg of jeans. “Don’t pull hard. I don’t got much slack. I drop this thing, we’re done.”

  “Sorry. Got excited,” Harry said. “I’ll tie the rope on.”

  Ricky waited, gripping the clothes too tightly, his knuckles yellow against the sunburned red of his hand. He felt the weight of the rope.

  “All yours,” Harry shouted.

  “I’ll pull it up. We’ll tie it down. Get you and the stuff,” Ricky said triumphantly.

  “What’re you going to tie it to?” Harry asked.

  Ricky turned and scanned the crater, as he carefully pulled up the line. The entire area was flat and treeless and rockless, with a whole lot of nothing but the holes they had dug. There was nothing to tie nothing onto nothing.

  FIFTY-ONE

  “I can’t hold your weight,” Frank said.

  “Yeah. I know.” Ricky’s head hurt from the thinking.

  Frank and Ricky lay on their backs and stared at the scattered clouds in the dying light. They didn’t want to leave Harry in the mine overnight. They had about an hour to decide their options before it would be too dark for safety.

  “I can’t climb down a rope,” Frank said.

  “Yeah. I know.” Ricky needed an aspirin, but of course the aspirin was in the burro’s pack. And the burro was down in the mine with Harry. And also dead, not that that impacted the effectiveness of the aspirin.

  It was like a puzzle. A brainteaser. It was like that game with the farmer and the fox and the chicken and the river. He couldn’t remember how it went, but he did remember that he hated that game. The whole thing was stupid. Why would a farmer want to get a fox across a river? The farmer would shoot the fox and then bring the chicken and the feed over. Or was it a dog? It might have been a snake.

  “Ricky, you still with me?” Frank’s voice snapped him back. Thinking had always slowed down Ricky’s tho
ughts.

  “Let’s talk it out,” Ricky said. “The two of us, we can lift Harry and the supplies out of that hole. Right?”

  “Sure. You’re strong. I bet you could do it yourself.”

  “Okay. That’s a start. We drop down the rope. We get the supplies. We get Harry up here. Then it’s all three of us. And all our stuff. Nobody’s trapped. That puts us at square one. But we’re trying to get to the end of the maze, not the beginning. We could leave Harry down there. Let him roam around, see what he finds. He’s already down there.”

  “It’s going to be dark soon.”

  “Mine’s dark no matter what time,” Ricky said.

  “He can’t get far on that leg.”

  “I should be down there. You think you two can hold my weight? You don’t got to lift, just keep the rope steady.”

  “Borderline. If we brace ourselves, tie the rope around our waists, maybe. We outweigh you, right? But what’s the difference? Then you’re in the mine, not Harry. Same difference.”

  “Totally different. I can get around. Like when we went diving. Same thing, but no water. Even with my arm, I can climb up and down the rope probably. I can move through the mines or shafts or tunnels or whatever they’re called. And we don’t got to worry about Harry getting hurt or trapped.”

  Frank turned his head, looking at Ricky’s profile. “Yeah, we don’t got to worry about Harry. Don’t mean something can’t happen to you. You hurt yourself, a rock falls on you, a cave-in. Hell, a spider bite, whatever, you’re screwed. Anything happens so you can’t climb the rope, we can’t get you back up, you die.”

  “The gold’s down there. Someone’s got to get it. I got the best shot. And I got faith in God and gold and my family and that weird, soapy head and everything else to know that I’ll be safe.”

  “That don’t comfort me. Faith is the surest way to get killed. You can believe, but don’t forget to watch your ass. Something happens, I’m going to feel like hell for not talking you out of this.”

  Harry was the last thing they pulled up. They had lifted all the supplies first, which had been considerably lighter and less squiggly. Harry wasn’t a tall man. But what he lacked in height, he made up for in density. Ricky couldn’t tell if he was getting weaker or if Harry was made out of some kind of fatty metal.