Big Maria (5 page)

“It was on the Internet. Says he was a Sicilian. That’s kind of like Italian, right?” Ricky said.

“What’s a computer know about Indians. Talking out of their holes. Next thing, you’ll tell me Tonto was a Chinaman.”

“I don’t know about Tonto.” Ricky felt bad. He hadn’t intended to anger Frank. The truth was important, even when it wasn’t what you wanted to hear. He tried to change the subject.

“I also read about the gold mines in the mountains around here.”

“Computers didn’t lie on that, but ain’t no news. They been finding gold out here since before Cortés. Indians and Mexicans, it’s their gold. The white man stole it, but what didn’t they?”

“Cortés don’t sound like a white guy.”

“White enough to be a thief.”

Ricky gave Frank a glance. “All you Indians still talk like that? The white man?”

“You better believe it, kemo sabe.” Frank tried to keep a straight face, but a fraction of a smile leaked onto his face.

“You come over here to mess with me?”

“Mostly,” Frank said, his smile broader.

“You ever found gold out here, Frank? Keep it stashed in your teepee? Secretly a millionaire?” Ricky returned Frank’s smile.

“No, but I know where the gold is.”

“Sure you do.” Ricky knew the old man was talking lies, but talking about gold was too fun. Everyone should spend some time talking treasure.

“The Big Maria Mine.”

Frank waited for Ricky to be impressed, got a blank stare, and then continued.

“They shut down Big Maria in 1903 or thereabouts. Just after the owner was killed in a fight over a fifth ace. Don’t know that man’s name. Long dead and forgot. The mine went to a relative, some cousin from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or some city. Fancy Boy set one foot in Picacho—that’s the mining town—and all that dust and heat sent him running back to the safety of concrete. He hired a man to run operations at Big Maria. This is where it gets good. That fella—his name I know: a Mister Abraham Constance—was not nearly as honest as our boy from Pittsadelphia thought. After six months Constance told him that he was shutting down the mine. That it was tapped. No more yield. No more gold.

“But it was a lie. A big lie. Still veins of gold up in Big Maria. The shelf everyone had been talking on. Some still do.”

“How do you know all this?” Ricky had lost all interest in his carburetor.

“My grandfather worked the Big Maria for Constance. Before and even after it was closed. In those days they only sent Mexicans and Indians into the mines. The Chinese came later. More expendable. Sure as hell more of them. God knows why, but Constance trusted the Chemehuevi best. Only a few people knew that the mining was active. Abraham Constance and his brown and red labor force.

“Then it went to hell. Constance got paranoid. Gold fever, Grandfather called it. The Indians, the Mexicans that worked for him, they started to die off, disappear. Grandfather wasn’t having any. He had no plans to wait around to get shot or disappeared. One night he snuck into Picacho, into Abraham Constance’s house. Brought his hunting knife. Cut the man open from asshole to eyeballs. Spilled him.”

“Jesus.” Ricky crossed himself. “Is any of this true?”

Frank ignored him. “Grandfather wanted nothing more to do with gold. One of those old, old Indians that believed in curses and the wind and omens. He saw what gold had made of man. He took Constance’s maps and papers and claims. Everything. He put them in one of Constance’s lockboxes and buried it.

“From what I understand of the superstitions of my people, I see why he didn’t want the papers. But I asked him, ‘Why not burn them?’ This is what he told me: ‘Like a dead Nüwü child’—
Nüwü
is what we call our people—‘Like a dead Nüwü child, the unfinished must be buried, or the flames of the dead are sure to awaken the unknowing.’ If you understand that malarkey, feel free to explain. Most Indian traditions make no sense to me.”

“Where did he bury all that stuff? The papers and maps?”

“He couldn’t take the body out and bury it. A townsfolk sees an Indian digging at night, raises questions. He buried Abraham Constance and the lockbox right where he killed him. In the earth under the floorboards of Constance’s own house.”

“You ever try to find it? You must have.”

“Never looked. Far as I know, all those papers, the maps to Big Maria are still there.”

“Aren’t you curious? I would’ve dug them up. Went looking for that mine, the gold.”

“You and me both, kid. I don’t believe all that Indian voodoo, if that’s what you’re thinking. Gold is just gold. It don’t change a man unless he’s the kind of man that wants to change. If I could have found them papers, I would have. One problem. My grandfather told me about the gold after the war—’47, ’48, thereabouts. Jesus, sixty years ago. The Imperial Dam was built in ’42. The town of Picacho, the buildings, everything, they’re all under the water of the Imperial Reservoir. And so are Constance and his maps.”

A
s Ricky drove the familiar route back to Blythe trying to make up time, he found himself daydreaming about gold and Indians and underwater ghost towns. It was the kind of thing that children played pretend about. Maybe he and Rosie could build a fort and stir up a story with her dolls. It made him feel like a kid to imagine hunting for treasure.

The mule deer appeared out of nowhere.

As the bus rounded a blind turn, the four-hundred-pound buck ran onto the two-lane road and stopped dead center. Ricky’s eyes met the deer’s, the animal turning to face the oncoming bus. The deer showed no fear, its serene face challenging the bus to charge.

Ricky had grown up in the country, taught to drive straight if the animal was smaller than a coyote and swerve if it was larger. Unfortunately, swerving and bus don’t mix. Ricky knew it but had no choice. He turned the wheel sharply.

A volley of complaints, screams, and a violent snore rose from the seats behind him. Ricky didn’t hear any of it over the sound of his own prolonged “Oh, shit.”

The bus went off the road, kicking up a cloud of dust as it passed the nonplussed deer. The front tires dipped into a two-foot gully, bouncing everyone out of their seats. The screams rose in volume.

The bus climbed the side of a rocky hill. Ricky fought to turn the wheel back onto the road, his foot above the brake pedal but not pressing it, for fear of losing what little control he had. At fifty miles per hour, the bus raced forward at a precarious thirty-degree angle on the side of the craggy slope. Ricky could feel the upper tires losing their purchase.

“Hold on,” he unnecessarily yelled over his shoulder. The head of the bobblehead Jesus on the dash fell off its body and rolled out of sight.

Ricky gripped the steering wheel so hard it felt like it was going to break off in his hands. He ground his teeth against each other and forgot to blink. He could feel the bus tipping, and just ahead he was running out of hill. If he didn’t get back on the road, the bus would drop into the next ravine. Could be five feet deep, could be fifty feet. He couldn’t see past all the brush and small trees. He couldn’t risk it.

Ricky turned the wheel hard left and slammed on the brakes. The rear of the bus fishtailed out to the right as the bus turned to face the road. The giant school bus skidded along the low mountain, turning sideways and perpendicular to the road. Ricky thought the kids called this drift racing. He had seen a special about it on cable. But nobody on the special had done it in a school bus.

The entire world around Ricky sounded like it was falling apart. The crunching and grating of metal on metal tore through the bus, the sound of ten thousand pennies spinning in a dryer.

Ricky flipped the wheel back to the right to try to straighten it out. Nothing doing. The bus had had enough.

An explosive, metallic bang is rarely a good sound.

I
t would take weeks before Ricky found out all the particulars of what that bang was or what had happened. He only had vague images when he came to. He remembered road and rock and the windshield shattering toward him. He remembered sliding sideways, his left shoulder scraping the open highway. He didn’t remember any sound other than loudness. Blood filtered the smell of smoke. He remembered being wheeled into the back of an ambulance. Someone telling him he was going to be okay. Not totally convinced of that statement’s truth. He remembered being able to see the bottom of the bus, which he knew was bad. He didn’t remember any pain.

And he didn’t remember seeing any dead bodies. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

H
arry couldn’t decide if he looked or felt worse.

Nestor and Tami with an
i
had really tuned him up. Two black eyes. A busted nose, which had been reset and taped with a metal thing to keep the shattered cartilage from sliding down his face. A gap where his two front teeth used to be, two more pebbles in the parking lot gravel. Assorted scrapes, bruises, and cuts. A missing earlobe that had apparently been gnawed off.

That was just his face.

He also sported a couple of broken ribs, a linear skull fracture, and somehow two broken big toes that hurt more than everything else. His butthole stung too, but he hadn’t told the doctor and never wanted to know why. He wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that there wasn’t something up in there, but the truth would eventually reveal itself.

Because of the skull fracture and having been found covered in feces, his doctor wanted to keep him in the hospital for observation. Another couple of nights to make sure there wasn’t any brain swelling, infection, or any number of possible complications.

Harry didn’t care. He rode his prison insurance. Keep me for the whole month, he thought. The food wasn’t no worse than what he ate at home. And although he’d sworn off women after the Tami near-tryst, there were a couple of nurses that were good to look at. Add a drink with a paper umbrella and it would be a sweet vacation.

That is, until his peace was disrupted by a racket in the hall. The quiet of the morning shattered by frantic activity throughout the hospital. Gurney after gurney rolled past his open door. Some
empty, some with moaning riders. When the sexy black nurse came to give him his pills, he asked what had happened.

Her face got serious. “Bus crash on the old road. Helicoptered in the bad ones. Just starting to drive in the minor injuries and the dead.”

“How many people?” Harry was more curious than concerned. He liked being in the know.

“Dead? Three, four definitely. Only hearing bits on my rounds. A couple more might not make it to tomorrow. That’s the word. Everyone on that bus was a senior citizen ’cept the driver. That’s a lot of trauma for old folk to take.”

Harry didn’t care anymore. “Can I get a couple more of those pills, the pain ones? My head won’t stop ringing.”

“You have to talk to your doctor about any change in your medication.”

“Can’t it be between you and me?”

“No.”

“If I gave you fifty dollars, would you run out and buy me a fifth of Wild Turkey?”

“No.”

“A hundred.”

“A hundred fifty.”

“For that much, you should show me your naked breasts, too.”

She cocked her head in that way only a sexy black nurse can.

Harry tried his best childlike smile. “I ain’t never seen black ones up close.”

She turned and took two steps toward the door.

“Okay, just the booze then.”

He told her where his wallet was. Watching her walk out the door with his cash, he wondered if he would ever have enough money to see her naked breasts.

W
hen the man in the uniform who may have been a deputy sheriff or possibly highway patrol told Ricky that three
people had died in the bus crash, he was too doped to completely understand. Groggy from the anesthetic from his first operation, he heard the words but didn’t grasp their meaning. He knew what dead meant and he understood that there had been a crash. He knew he was in a hospital and that people were helping him. But he couldn’t put it all together. He could see all the pieces, but the jigsaw puzzle was still in the box.

Ricky slept through the rest of the day. If he had dreams, he didn’t remember them.

By the second day, all drug-induced denial had passed. All Ricky’s injuries allowed him to do was lie still and dwell on his role in the crash. Not knowing who Kübler-Ross was, he hurdled anger and bargaining and jumped straight to depression. And blame. And self-pity.

He tried to piece together everything that had happened in those ten seconds. He couldn’t help second-guess his reaction time and choices. Had he been going too fast? What if he had braked earlier? Hit the deer instead of swerving? There were so many ifs that could have swung the result in a different direction. Inches and seconds. He had done his best, but his best had gotten three people killed. Three people and counting with Mrs. Apodaca and Mr. Martinez in the ICU.

He tried prayer, but it gave him no solace. The sound of his voice only made him feel more alone.

In his younger days, he had done things that he regretted. But since Rosie’s birth, he had done everything to live a Christian life. To have a positive impact on the world. To be good. But trying wasn’t enough. Being good wasn’t all that mattered. For all the pleases and thank-yous, you could still do damage. You could still destroy. People could still die. And praying wasn’t going to bring them back.

No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it, the dead haunted him.

According to the doctors, he would be in the hospital for at least a week. He was banged up from head to toe, but it was his left arm and shoulder that was the major concern. The skin and muscle were worn to the bone from where they had scraped against the tarmacadam. More than half of his deltoid muscle had been erased, shredded into a mutilated tatter of meat. The skin at the edges of the massive wound had been cauterized from the friction. A specialist was brought in to assess how much of the muscle would heal and how much strength and movement he would have. The man concluded that avoiding amputation would be considered a win.