The Rock Child

by Win Blevins

  “What sort of people hold slaves?” asked Sir Richard.

  Now Tommy beamed all his teeth into a brilliant smile. “Whoever has the power,” he said.

  All the cajoolies in the world attacked me at once.

  “Daniel!” came the cry. It was the mixologist. “Asie!” He gave a jerk of his head toward the piano.

  Saved from Tommy Kirk. We went back at it.

  Since we’d been hoping Sun Moon would hear us tonight, Daniel and I were ready to put our best foot forward, all our favorites done the way we liked ’em best together, plus something new—we were going to be a trio instead of a duet, because I was going to whistle.

  It’s tricky business, combining a pair of lips with eighty-eight piano keys and five banjo strings—the five and eighty-eight are a lot stronger. Lips go high, though, and high carries. I got in some sweet and lovely echoing and high harmony on several spirituals, particularly, I thought, on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

  Halfway through the playing I saw Tommy Kirk head out, Q Mark behind him. I thought the room felt warmer.

  We jumped back into it, and went more for some driving rhythms. The drinkers in the Heritage like to dance, and that’s sure what the courtesans want. So we gave ’em a lot of schottisches, quadrilles, and reels, stuff to make the feet jumping beans.

  Something’s niggling at me here, and I’ve got to say it. You notice I don’t use the word whore. I say courtesan. I have known a good many women in the brothel trade in my life, and I have gotten to where I cannot say that other word. If courtesan is a damn fool word, there’s no helping it.

  Dan and me quit when we got tired, close on midnight, and to the devil with the courtesans’ business. One last drink and cigar and we headed for home. Outside the Heritage Daniel starts to excuse himself and Sir Richard makes him pause. “Tommy said to tell you he’s expecting you tonight. Any hour, he said,” says Sir Richard.

  I looked at Daniel right surprised. Daniel wasn’t one for opium, gambling, nor courtesans, nor anything like that. Far as I could tell, he was a teetotaler for all vices, and didn’t even eat.

  I saw Sun Moon was keeping her eyes away from him, too, disappointed.

  He looked nervously at Sun Moon and me and then glared at Sir Richard. After a bit of glaring, he says, “It’s a business proposition.” With that he strides off into the cold mountain night, body like a cornstalk and arms flapping like leaves.

  As the three of us headed for our rooms, I says, “Don’t like that Tommy Kirk.”

  Sir Richard looked at me with that kindly curiosity of his. “Tommy’s keen to make money, lots of money.”

  “He’s going for power,” says I.

  “He mistake what is power,” said Sun Moon.

  I stopped and looked at her queer. We were standing in front of the hotel now.

  Sir Richard observed, “Oh, I assure you, if anyone understands power, it is Tommy Kirk. He means to have a great lot of it.”

  “There be no power that way, none,” says Sun Moon.

  I looked at her flabbergasted. If a fellow owns several dozen women who earn him money, if the gambling joints are his and the opium dens and the restaurants, and all the profits from them, if he’s heading to be the main landlord in town, if he’s reinvesting that money in owning pieces of the Comstock Lode, well, what he sure enough has is power, conniptions of it.

  “He controls the lives of more people than any other man in Chinatown,” says Sir Richard. “I suspect that before long he will in Virginia City as well.”

  Sun Moon smiled gently at Sir Richard. “A man who no control his lusts,” she said, “his urge for acquire. A man who fears others so grasps for control of them.” Her eyes sought my face in the darkness. “A man so great lust, so great fear, so little love. Where is his power?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sam said we had to see the abandoned shafts—not the working shafts, where we’d already been, but the shafts that had been started, headed off somewhere, and came up with nothing. Sort of petered out, a graveyard of human hopes.

  We left Sun Moon with Q Mark. She was a little feverish one day and OK the next, half-well, which wasn’t well enough. The evening was cool and pleasant. Sam, Sir Richard, and me dressed in clothes we didn’t mind getting dirty, which meant the only other pants and shirt I had. “You speak of your weird and wondrous places,” says Sam. “No man has imagination sufficient unto the task.” He was carrying a big coil of hemp rope, which kinda gave me the whirligigs in my belly.

  Tramping about, we soon discovered that the entrances of these shafts were underfoot on the eastern face of Sun Mountain just about everywhere—some of them were even right in town. Trouble was, they were caved in halfway, or even caved in far enough you couldn’t make ’em out at all, so they just looked like jumbled places on the hillside.

  “These places are the first habitation of death in Virginia,” said Sam. “More people die in them than at the hands of our badmen. You are thinking that I speak of the poor brutes who dug them by physical exertion, and so I am, for these holes cave in often enough, and carry the laborers to immortality. Afterward, surprisingly, they remain instruments of the grim reaper. Since they are difficult to spot, people fall into them.” Now Sam gave a sly, self-mocking smile. “That, however, is where God’s grace enters. Goats wander around the mountain, looking for all omnium-gatherum of things goats eat, and end up making a kind of feather bed at the bottom of the shafts. Why, just last month a six-year-old boy and his canine sidekick disappeared. They were found two days later at the bottom of a shaft, lying on great pillows of goats, both in fine fettle.”

  Sir Richard smiled all the time around Sam. He found our friend’s language fascinating, and our friend worked up his talk to delight Sir Richard.

  I wondered if Sir Richard was remembering he had to come up with some kind of newspaper story for Sam, somehow someday.

  He climbed up to a spot in the shade of a big ledge, threw the rope on the ground, and started fixing one end to a timber. “This is the biggest coyote hole around,” he says merrily. I was staring at the timber he was fixing the rope to. We were going to let ourselves into the bowels of the earth with our lives tied to that? The notion gave me the willywoollies. There was a pulley hanging from the timber, though, and it must once have borne the weight of earth and rock being hauled up.

  Sam led the way. “Just hold tight, boys,” he said cheerfully.

  I went second, thinking my willywoollies would be worse waiting up top. It was a hand-over-hand job at a sharp angle, too steep to climb but not a straight drop. My feet were on the ground the whole time—felt easy enough, as it’s always easy to get into trouble.

  Where it leveled out, Sam was standing and waiting. He halloed up for Sir Richard to come on down and lit the lantern. The coyote hole followed a seam in the rock or whatever will-o’-the-wisp the miners thought they saw. We headed along. I noticed a cool breeze blowing lightly at my back, brushing my fingers and ankles and the back of my neck like strands of hair of a phantom.

  I yearned for topside. I also tried to imagine the madness of the men who dug it. Fevered, they must have been. They turned the sight of gold—not even the sight, the mere thought of gold—into a fever. It infected their minds, it bubbled through their blood, it charged through their arms and legs and emerged in the form of all this work—months of slavish labor, thrusting a hole into the earth with a shovel, clouting some rock with a pick, blasting other rock to smithereens, hauling the dirt and stone out in wheelbarrows and then buckets, timbering up to keep the sheer weight of Mother Earth from avalanching onto them, and doing the whole shebang again, and again, and again. All to chase after a yellow gleam that disappeared on a whim, like a swamp light.

  Half of me says, “My stars and cornicles, this is the true madness.”

  The other half goes, “Heckahoy, it’s Flabbergastonia.”

  “There are things here you have never imagined,” says Sam, in the tone of a ghost story.
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  “Behold!” said Sam, and held the lantern high. Monsters. Monsters everywhere.

  Not your commonplace monsters, such as your romance-spinners dream up, but growths of insane form—I would say like bushes, barb-wire, beer bottles, all those and more, cashews, cabbages, and coons, except those are everyday things. This was nature run amok.

  Sam took my hand and put it on a critter shaped like a tangle of string. It gave to my touch, and my hand jumped back. I tried again. It was wet, bendy, and creepy.

  “Fungi,” said Sir Richard.

  “Funguses,” agreed Sam.

  Mushrooms! Gigantic mushrooms! Thinking of them that way made it seem not so bad. I took the lantern from Sam and went on an inspection tour. It was like the Lord had given some ogre of a kid a vat of taffy, and the kid went wild. There were slimy curtains of them, nests of squirming snakes, piles of ram’s horns, beavertail cactuses, and every other shape. I came on a different one looked like a little statue sticking up out of the ground. Walking around it, I saw it was made of crystals, like salt, and formed like a berobed woman. “Mineral,” says Sam. “I call it ‘Lot’s wife.’ You know, she came down here and never got out.”

  Just then came the eeriest sound I’d ever heard, echoing around the rock walls. “OH-Oh-oh-ah-AH-oh-oh!” a cackle, interrupted by queer stops, like devilish hiccups. The cajoolies clawed at my stomach. The cackle paused and then doubled up, twice as loud, twice as long, twice as scary.

  I knew what it was in an instant. Sir Richard’s eyes said he did, too. Porter Rockwell had found us, and in the worst possible place.

  “I’m pulling the rope u-u-up!” It was said in a mock child’s voice, high and singsong.

  I imagined I could hear the rope slithering up the rocks, barely shushing, like a dry snakeskin.

  Suddenly I was aware that it was night outside, and dark, very dark, and even darker in here.

  “What the hell?” says Sam.

  “We know who it is,” says I.

  Sir Richard nodded.

  “Porter Rockwell.”

  “Porter Rockwell? The Destroying Angel? The sinning Saint? Boys, we are in for it.”

  “Take me serious,” says I. “Believe it. Porter Rockwell.”

  Came the cackle again, but now I could hear it was a wail, uninterrupted, a lost sound, soughing, circling round and round, soughing and soughing, the sound of an abandoned soul.

  A change of aspect came to Sam’s face. He was sober, nearly grim. “What will he do?”

  Sir Richard said, “Kill us, probably. The question is, Will he leave us in this hole and go destroy Sun Moon? Or kill us first, then Sun Moon?”

  “We gotta help her,” says I, paying no attention to the fact that she had Q Mark to watch after her, and was in less trouble than we were.

  “I don’t know this Saint, but he ain’t gonna kill this Missourian,” said Sam. “I know another way out.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. Then I felt embarrassed about how eager I sounded.

  “I don’t know,” drawled Sam. “I believe that boy could hear us walking off. He might know where the air shaft is. Probably does, if he’s smart. He’d just wait for us there.”

  “What is your plan?” said Sir Richard.

  “I’m armed,” said Sam. “Are you?”

  Sir Richard touched the hogleg he always carried.

  “You boys move back toward the entrance. Don’t expose yourselves, use the timbers and boulders, but don’t be too quiet. Act like you was trying to be quiet and not getting the job done.

  “Meanwhile, I’ll ease out and come around behind the bastard.” Sam flicked his eyes back and forth between us, excited. “It won’t take me any more’n five minutes to get there, ten at the most. So,” he considered, “after ten minutes you’ll hear me shoot. Then you’re in the clear.”

  I nodded. After a pause, Sir Richard did, too.

  That ten minutes was the longest I ever waited in my life.

  Except for the next five.

  And the next five.

  And the ten after that.

  Since we didn’t have a lantern, Sir Richard struck a match and checked his pocket watch. We both knew, but he said, “We’ll wait five more minutes, by the clock.”

  When it was gone, we didn’t need to talk about our situation. Something had happened to Sam, or maybe he had run off. Either way, we were abandoned to the malice of Porter Rockwell.

  “Let’s find the air shaft,” says I.

  We upped and moved down the tunnel. Every score of steps, Sir Richard would light a match and we would peer all around. And peer. And step. And peer.

  Where that got us, after a while, was out of matches. Sam had taken the lantern. We sat in the darkest dark I had experienced. I let myself cry inside.

  “The only way out,” says Sir Richard, “is the way we came in.”

  I sighed loud enough for Rockwell to hear us.

  Back near the entrance I noticed we could see a little. The entrance was a patch of half-light. It even had moon shadows.

  We whispered. “See if you can climb up,” says Sir Richard. “See if you can draw fire. When he appears, I’ll shoot him.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “He’ll be shooting at sound and sound alone,” says Sir Richard. “Any hit would be luck.”

  Bad luck, my luck, thought I. But I started. What other chance did we have? What other chance did Sun Moon have?

  I will not tell you it wasn’t as hard as I thought. It was harder, scratching for handholds and footholds like a blind chicken. I’d find a spot for a hand, or a finger, and scrape my boot up and down, looking for an inch of ledge. Step up like a fool into darkness and nothingness, and try it again.

  It was impossible to be quiet. Everything I did made noise. Scrape of sole. Brush of pant leg. Heave of breath. I even knocked half a dozen rocks off, and they rattle-crackled into the black hole. The one I was coming out of, not the one I was going into.

  Every minute I expected the gunshot from above. In my imagination it never missed. But, dying, I got to hear the answering shots of Sir Richard below.

  No shots came. No sounds at all.

  I wondered whether Rockwell was waiting or not. Maybe …

  I shivered.

  Then I would picture my head climbing and climbing heroically and finally rising into the entrance, seeing and smelling the sweet night air.

  Then Porter Rockwell would stick a barrel in my eye and make a black hole of my mind forever.

  The shots didn’t come.

  No sounds came.

  I pictured the barrel coming into my eye, and flinched. But it didn’t come.

  Eventually, gasping for breath, I got to where the angle of the rock eased, and went level.

  In the half-light I saw the timber, and the rope coiled neatly below.

  And then it came.

  A chuckle.

  A rip-snorting, hog-roaring, ain’t-it-grand chuckle.

  I sank to my knees, whipped.

  Then came a giggle. A sweet, piping, childish giggle.

  Then chuckle and giggle at once, from two directions.

  I looked around.

  A match scratched and flared. In its light was haloed a head. It was a flattish head, like it had been squashed by sledgehammers head and chin at the same time. It was dark-skinned and silver-haired. A feather stuck up from it. And it was grinning.

  The head said something I didn’t understand.

  Another match spewed, and a lantern lit. In its glow grinned the big, mustachioed countenance of Sam Clemens. “Believe we got em this time, Joe.”

  The head giggled, and jiggled with pleasure. “Sure did. Sure did.”

  I took the lantern a little rough from Sam and set it where Sir Richard could see it from below. I didn’t trust my tongue yet, I was so mad.

  “Asie?” queried Sir Richard from below.

  I threw the rope into the darkness.

  “Come on up,” says I. “Sam has had
some fun with us.”

  I turned to him. “What did you do this for?”

  Sam says, “You wanted to meet a Paiute.” He held out the lantern to reveal the old fellow. His mouth was wide and set in a toothless smile. His eyes glinted like mischief. His face was ancient. “This is Paiute Joe,” said Sam. The body was dressed in raggedy white-man clothes, right down to a wisp of cravat. The friendly face was adorned with three lines zigzagging in parallel, like red, white, and black lightning.

  Silver Head gave me the sweetest look I ever did see in my life. He opened his arms and whirled, embracing the world and giggling like a fool. As he came back to face me, he held out the arms to me. “Good you be here,” he said. “Well come.”

  I decided I wasn’t ready to be hugged, not right then.

  Sir Richard arrived, panting worse even than I did. He looked hard at Sam. Sam says easy-like, “Well, you could consider we’re even for that story you didn’t give me.”

  “I will,” says Sir Richard.

  I spoke grumpily to the old man. “Say something in Paiute.”

  He gave me that sweet look again. It was enough to make you giggle forever. “Brggdly gmp,” he said, or something to that effect.

  “Something else,” I prompted.

  “RASS-yo chidle. Brggdly gmp.”

  That was enough for me. Whatever Paiute was, it was nothing like what I heard under the river. It was just a plain human language. “What did you say? In English what did you say?”

  “I make sorry to you. Come eat home me.” He giggled.

  I looked at Sam, who shook his head no.

  “Next day,” said Paiute Joe. “Come next day.”

  “Sure,” I said, “eat. Tomorrow.”

  With that Paiute Joe set off, walking backward, and flashing at us the angelic sweetness of his smile.

  We ate our dinner in silence, uncertain, not having a good time or bad, eyes checking each other out. Besides Sir Richard and me and Sam, and Paiute Joe, there was a man introduced as his brother and two of his sons. We just sat around the fire spooning food out of our bowls and into our mouths. The women of Paiute Joe’s family, all ages, and the kids ate off to the side. They had a good old regular time gabbing and laughing and paying us no mind.