“What did you think you were doing?” his father asks him. He was shouting but it wasn’t really much of a scold even so, because he gave the boy a kiss practically between every word. “Your mother is scared to death! Why did you do it? Why in God’s name did you come in here?”
What he replied was the last real talking he did, and remember it well. “Colonel Henry and Major Pike told me to,” he said. “They told me I could see the Ponderosa. In there.” He pointed at the crack running down the middle of the slide. “But I couldn’t. Ponderosa all gone.” Then he laid his head down on his father’s shoulder and closed his eyes, like he was all tuckered out.
“Let’s go back,” I said. “I’ll walk behind you and to your right, so I can shine the light on your footing. Don’t linger, but don’t run, either. And for Christ’s sake try not to bump any of the jackstraws holding this place up.”
Once we actually had the boy, that groaning in the ground seemed louder than ever. I fancied I could even hear the timbers creaking. I’m not usually an imaginative sort, but it sounded to me like they were trying to talk. Telling us to get out while we still could.
I couldn’t resist shining my light into that crack once before we went, though. When I bent down I could feel air rushing out, so it wasn’t just a crack in the slide; there was some sort of rift on the other side of it. Maybe a cave. The air coming out was as hot as air coming out of a furnace grate, and it stank something fierce. One whiff and I held my breath so I wouldn’t vomit. It was the old- campfire smell, but a thousand times heavier. I’ve racked my brains trying to think of how something that deep underground could smell so bad, and keep coming up empty. Fresh air is the only thing that makes things stink like that, and that means some sort of vent, but Deep Earth has been burrowing in these parts ever since 1957, and if there had been a vent big enough to manufacture a stench like that, surely it would’ve been found and either plugged or followed to see where it went.
The crack looked like a
I turned back to Garin and told him to move.
“In a second, just give me a second,” he says. He’d taken the boy’s little black cowboy boot out of his shirt and was sliding it on his foot. It was the tenderest thing. All you’d ever need to know about a father’s love was in the way he did that. “Okay,” he says when he had it right. “Let’s go.”
“Right,” I says. “Just try to keep your footing.”
We went as quick as we could, but it still seemed to take forever. In the dreams I mentioned, I always see the little circle of my Penlite sliding over skulls. There weren’t that many that I saw when we were actually in there, and some of those had fallen apart, but in my dreams it seems like there are thousands, wall to wall skulls sticking up round like eggs in a carton, and they are all grinning just like the little one was grinning when his Dad picked him up, and in their eyesockets I see little red flecks dancing around, like embers rising from a wildfire.
It was a pretty awful walk, all in all. I kept looking ahead for daylight, and for the longest time I didn’t see it. Then, when I finally did (just a little tiny square I could have covered with the ball of my thumb at first), it seemed like the sound of the hornfels was louder than ever, and I made up my mind that the shaft was going to wait until we were almost out, then fall on us like a hand swatting flies. As if a hole in the ground could think! But when you’re actually in a spot like that, your imagination is apt to go haywire. Sound carries funny; ideas do, too.
And I might as well say that I still have a few funny ideas about Rattlesnake Number One. I’m not going to say it was haunted, not even in a “backstage report” no one may ever read, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t, either. After all, what place would be more likely to have ghosts than a mine full of dead men? But as to the other side of that slide of rock, if I actually did see something there- those dancing red lights-it wasn’t ghosts.
The last hundred feet were the hardest. It took everything I had in me not to just shove past Mr Garin and sprint for it, and I could see on his face that he felt the same way. But we didn’t, probably because we both knew we’d scare the rest of the family even worse if we came busting out in a panic. We walked out like men instead, Garin with his boy in his arms, fast asleep.
That was our “little scare”.
Mrs Garin and both the two older kids were crying, and they all made of Seth, petting him and kissing him like they could hardly believe he was there. He woke up and smiled at them, but he didn’t make any more words, just kind of “gobbled”. Mr Garin staggered off to the powder magazine, which is a little metal shed where we keep our blasting stuff, and sat down with his back against the side. He laced his hands together between his knees and then dropped his forehead into them. I knew just how he felt. His wife asked him if he was all right, and he said yes, he only needed to rest and catch his breath. I said I did, too. I asked Mrs Garin if she’d take her kids back over to the ATV. I said maybe Jack would like to show his brother our Miss Mo. She kind of laughed like you do when nothing is funny and said, “I think we’ve had enough adventures for one day, Mr Symes. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but all I want to do is get out of here.”
I said I understood, and I think she understood that I needed to have a little talk with her man before we picked up our marbles and called it a game. Not that I didn’t need to collect myself some, too! My legs felt like rubber. I went over to the powder magazine and sat down beside Mr Garin.
“If we report this, there’s going to be a lot of trouble,” I said. “For the company and also for me. I probably wouldn’t end up fired, but I could.”
“I’m not going to say a word,” he said, raising his head out of his hands and looking me in the eye. And I don’t think anyone will hold it against him if I add that he was crying. Any father would have cried, I think, after a scare like that. I was near tears myself, and I hadn’t ever set eyes on the lot of them until that day. Every time I thought of the tender way Garin looked, slipping that tiny boot on his boy’s foot, it raised a lump in my throat.
“I would appreciate that no end,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t even know how to start.”
I was starting to feel a little embarrassed by then. “Come on, now,” I said. “We did it together, and all’s well that ends well.”
I helped him to his feet, and we walked back toward the others. We were most of the way there when he put his hand on my arm and stopped me.
“You shouldn’t let anybody go in there,” he said. “Not even if the engineers say they can shore it up. There’s something wrong in there.”
“I know there is,” I said. “I felt it.” I thought of the grin on the boy’s face-even now, all these months later, it makes me shiver to think of it-and almost told him that his boy had felt it, too. Then I decided not to. What good would it have done?
“If it were up to me,” he said, “I’d toss a charge from your powder magazine in there and bring the whole thing down. It’s a grave. Let the dead rest in it.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said, and God must have thought so, too, because He did it on His own not two weeks later. There was an explosion in there. And, so far as I know, no cause ever assigned.
Garin kind of laughed and shook his head and said, “Two hours on the road and I won’t even be able to believe this happened.”
I told him maybe that was just as well.
“But one thing I won’t forget,” he said, “is that Seth talked today. Not just words or phrases only his family could understand, either. He actually talked. You don’t know how amazing that is, but we do.” He waved at his family, who had got back into the ATV by then. “And if he can do it once, he can do it again.” And maybe he has, I hope so. I’d like to know, too. I’m curious about that boy, and in more ways than one. When I gave him his little action figure woman, he smiled at me and kissed my cheek. A sweet kiss, too, though I seemed to catch a little whiff on the mine of his skin… like ashes and meat and cold coffee.
We “bid a fond adieu” to the China Pit and I drove them back to the office trailer where their car was. So far as I could see, no one took much notice of us, even though I drove right down Main Street. Desperation on a Sunday afternoon in the hot weather is like a ghost-town.
I remember standing there at the bottom of the trailer steps, waving as they drove off toward the awful thing Garin’s sister said was waiting for them at the end of their trip-a senseless driveby shooting. All of them waved back… except for Seth, that is. Whatever was in that mine, I think we were fortunate to get out… and for him to then be the only survivor of that shooting in San Jose! It’s almost as if he’s got what they call “a charmed life”, isn’t it?
As I said, I dreamed about it in Peru-mostly the skull-dream, and of shining my light into that crack-but I didn’t think of it much until I read Audrey Wyler’s letter, the one that was tacked on the bulletin board when I came back from Peru. Sally lost the envelope, but said it just came addressed to “The Mining Company of Desperation”. Reading it reinforced my belief that something happened out there when Seth was underbill (as we say in the business), something it might be wrong to lie about, but I did lie. How could I not, when I didn’t even know what that something was?
Still, that grin.
That grin.
He was a nice little boy, and I am so glad he wasn’t killed in the Rattlesnake (and he could have been; we all could have been) or with the rest of them in San Jose, but…
The grin didn’t seem to belong to the boy at all. I wish I could say better, but that’s as close as I can come.
I want to set down one more thing. You may remember me saying that Seth talked about “the old mine”, but that I didn’t connect that with the Rattlesnake shaft because hardly anyone in town knew about it, let alone through-travelers from Ohio. Well, I started thinking about what he’d said again while I was standing there, watching the dust from their car settle. That, and how he ran across the office trailer, right to the pictures of the China Pit on the bulletin board, like he’d been there a thousand times before. Like he knew. I had an idea then, and that cold feeling came with it. I went back inside to look at the pictures, knowing it was the only way I could lay that feeling to rest.
There were six in all, aerial photos the company had commissioned in the spring. I got the little magnifier off my key-chain and ran it over them, one after another. My gut was rolling, telling me what I was going to see even before I saw it. The aerials were taken long before the blast-pattern that uncovered the Rattlesnake shaft, so there was no sign of it in them. Except there was. Remember me writing that he tapped his way around the pictures, saying: “Here it is, here’s what I want to see, here’s the mine'? We thought he was talking about the pit-mine, because that’s what the pictures were of. But with my magnifying loupe I could see the prints his fingers had left on the shiny surface of the photos. Every one was on the south face, where we uncovered the shaft. That was what he was telling us he wanted to see, not the pit-mine but the shaft-mine the pictures didn’t even show. I know how crazy that must sound, but I have never doubted it. He knew it was there. To me, the marks of his finger on the photographs-not just one photo but all six-prove it. I know it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, but that doesn’t change what I know. It’s like something in that mine sensed him going past on the highway and called out to him. And of all my questions, there’s maybe only one that really matters: Is Seth Garin all right? I would write Garin’s sister and ask, have once or twice actually picked up a pen to do that, and then I remember that I lied, and a lie is hard for me to admit. Also, do I really want to prod a sleeping dog that might turn out to have big teeth? I don’t think so, but…
There should be more to say, maybe, but there isn’t. It all comes back to the grin.
I don’t like the way he grinned.
This is my true statement of what happened; God, if only I knew what it was I saw!
Chapter Eleven
Old Doc was the first one over the Carvers” back fence. He surprised them all (including himself) by going up easily, needing only a single boost in the butt from Johnny to get him started. He paused at the top for a second or two, setting his hands to his liking. To Brad Josephson he looked like a skinny monkey in the moonlight. He dropped. There was a soft grunt from the other side of the stakes.
