Desperation (39 page)

2

“Long before anyone ever thought
of mining for copper here, it was gold and silver,” Billingsley said. He eased himself down into the wing-chair and shook his head when David offered him a glass of spring-water. “That was long before open-pit mining was thought of, either. In 1858, an outfit called Diablo Mining opened Rattlesnake Number One where the China Pit is now. There was gold, and a good bit of it.

“It was a shaft-mine—back then they all were—and they kept chasing the vein deeper and deeper, although the company had to know how dangerous it was. The surface up there on the south side of where the pit is now ain't bad—it's limestone, skarn, and a kind of Nevada marble. You find wollastonite in it lots of times. Not valuable, but pretty to look at.

“Underneath, on the north side of where the pit is now, that's where they sank the Rattlesnake Shaft. The ground over there is bad. Bad for mining, bad for farming, bad for everything. Sour ground is what the Shoshone called it. They had a word for it, a good one, most Shoshone words are good ones, but I disremember it now. All of this is igneous leavings, you know, stuff that was injected into the crust of the earth by volcanic eruptions that never quite made it to the surface. There's a word for that kind of leavings, but I disremember that one, too.”

“Porphyry,” Audrey called over to him. She was standing on the right side of the stage, holding a bag of pretzels. “Anyone want some of these? They smell a little funny but they taste all right.”

“No, thanks,” Mary said. The others shook their heads.

“Porphyry's the word,” Billingsley agreed. “It's full of valuable stuff, everything from garnets to uranium, but a lot of it's unstable. The ground where they sank Rattlesnake Number One had a good vein of gold, but mostly it was hornfels—cooked shale. Shale's a sedimentary rock, not strong. You can snap a piece of it in your hands, and when that mine got down seventy feet and the men could hear the walls groaning and squeaking around them, they decided enough was enough. They just walked out. It wasn't a strike for better pay; they just didn't want to die. So what the owners did was hire Chinese. Had them shipped on flatback wagons from Frisco, chained together like convicts. Seventy men and twenty women, all dressed in quilted pajama coats and little round hats. I imagine the owners kicked themselves for not thinking of using them sooner, because they had all sorts of advantages over white men. They didn't get drunk and hooraw through town, they didn't trade liquor to the Shoshone or Paiute, they didn't want whores. They didn't even spit tobacco on the sidewalks. Those were just the bonuses, though. The main thing was they'd go as deep as they were told to go, and never mind the sound of the hornfels squeaking and rubbing in the ground all around them. And the shaft could go deeper faster, because it didn't have to be so big—they were a lot smaller than the white miners, and could be made to work on their knees. Also, any Chinese miner caught with gold-bearing rock on his person could be shot on the spot. And a few were.”

“Christ,” Johnny said.

“Not much like the old John Wayne movies,” Billingsley agreed. “Anyway, they were a hundred and fifty feet down—almost twice as deep as when the white miners threw down their picks—when the cave-in happened. There are all kinds of stories about it. One is that they dug up a
waisin,
a kind of ancient earth-spirit, and it tore the mine down. Another is that they made the tommyknockers mad.”

“What're tommyknockers?” David asked.

“Troublemakers,” Johnny said. “The underground version of gremlins.”

“Three things,” Audrey said from her place at stage-right. She was nibbling a pretzel. “First, you call that sort of mine-work a drift, not a shaft. Second, you
drive
a driftway, you don't sink it. Third, it was a cave-in, pure and simple. No tommyknockers, no earth-spirits.”

“Rationalism speaks,” Johnny said. “The spirit of the century. Hurrah!”

“I wouldn't go ten feet into that kind of ground,” Audrey said, “no sane person would, and there they were, a hundred and fifty feet deep, forty miners, a couple of bossmen, at least five ponies, all of them chipping and tromping and yelling, doing everything but setting off dynamite. What's amazing is how long the tommyknockers
protected
them from their own idiocy!”

“When the cave-in finally
did
happen, it happened in what should have been a good place,” Billingsley resumed. “The roof fell in about sixty feet from the adit.” He glanced at David. “That's what you call the entrance to a mine, son. The miners got up that far from below, and there they were stopped by twenty feet of fallen hornfels, skarn, and Devonian shale. The whistle went off, and the folks from town came up the hill to see what had happened. Even the whores and the gamblers came up. They could hear the Chinamen inside screaming, begging to be dug out before the rest of it came down. Some said they sounded like they were fighting with each other. But no one wanted to go in and start digging. That squealing sound hornfels makes when the ground's uneasy was louder than ever, and the roof was bowed down in a couple of places between the adit and the first rockfall.”

“Could those places have been shored up?” Steve asked.

“Sure, but nobody wanted to take the responsibility for doing it. Two days later, the president and vice president of Diablo Mines showed up with a couple of mining engineers from Reno. They had a picnic lunch outside the adit while they talked over what to do, my dad told me. Ate it spread out on linen while inside that shaft—pardon me, the
drift
—not ninety feet from where they were, forty human souls were screaming in the dark.

“There had been cave-ins deeper in, folks said they sounded like something was farting or burping deep down in the earth, but the Chinese were still okay—still alive, anyway—behind the first rockfall, begging to be dug out. They were eating the mine-ponies by then, I imagine, and they'd had no water or light for two days. The mining engineers went in—poked their heads in, anyway—and said it was too dangerous for any sort of rescue operation.”

“So what did they do?” Mary asked.

Billingsley shrugged. “Set dynamite charges at the front of the mine and brought that down, too. Shut her up.”

“Are you saying they deliberately buried forty people alive?” Cynthia asked.

“Forty-two counting the line-boss and the foreman,” Billingsley said. “The line-boss was white, but a drunk and a man known to speak foul language to decent women. No one spoke up for him. The foreman either, far as that goes.”

“How could they do it?”

“Most were Chinese, ma'am,” Billingsley said, “so it was easy.”

The wind gusted. The building trembled beneath its rough caress like something alive. They could hear the faint sound of the window in the ladies' room banging back and forth. Johnny kept waiting for it to yawn wide enough to knock over Billingsley's bottle booby-trap.

“But that's not quite the end of the story,” Billingsley said. “You know how stuff like this grows in folks' minds over the years.” He put his hands together and wiggled the gnarled fingers. On the movie screen a gigantic bird, a legendary death-kite, seemed to soar. “It grows like shadows.”

“Well, what's the end of it?” Johnny asked. Even after all these years he was a sucker for a good story when he heard one, and this one wasn't bad.

“Three days later, two young Chinese fellows showed up at the Lady Day, a saloon which stood about where The Broken Drum is now. Shot seven men before they were subdued. Killed two. One of the ones they killed was the mining engineer from Reno who recommended that the shaft be brought down.”

“Drift,” Audrey said.

“Quiet,” Johnny said, and motioned for Billingsley to go on.

“One of the ‘coolie-boys'—that's what they were called—was killed himself in the fracas. A knife in the back, most likely, although the story most people like is that a professional gambler named Harold Brophy flicked a playing-card from where he was sitting and cut the man's throat with it.

“The one still alive was shot in five or six places. That didn't stop em from taking him out and hanging him the next day, though, after a little sawhorse trial in front of a kangaroo court. I bet he was a disappointment to them; according to the story, he was too crazy to have any idea what was happening. They had chains on his legs and cuffs on his wrists and still he fought them like a catamount, raving in his own language all the while.”

Billingsley leaned forward a little, seeming to stare at David in particular. The boy looked back at him, eyes wide and fascinated.

“All of what he said was in the heathen Chinee, but one idea everyone got was that
he and his friend had gotten out of the mine
and come to take revenge on those who first put them there and then left them there.”

Billingsley shrugged.

“Most likely they were just two young men from the so-called Chinese Encampment south of Ely, men not quite so passive or resigned as the others. By then the story of the cave-in had travelled, and folks in the Encampment would have known about it. Some probably had relatives in Desperation. And you have to remember that the one who actually survived the shootout didn't have any English other than cuss-words. Most of what they got from him must have come from his gestures. And you know how people love that last twist of the knife in a tall tale. Why, it wasn't a year before folks were saying the Chinese miners were
still
alive in there, that they could hear em talking and laughing and pleading to be let out, moaning and promising revenge.”

“Would it have been possible for a couple of men to have gotten out?” Steve asked.

“No,” Audrey said from the doorway.

Billingsley glanced her way, then turned his puffy, red-rimmed eyes on Steve. “I reckon,” he said. “The two of them might've started back down the shaft together, while the rest clustered behind the rockfall. One of em might have remembered a vent or a chimney—”

“Bullshit,” Audrey said.

“It
ain't,
” Billingsley said, “and you know it. This is an old volcano-field. There's even extrusive porphyry east of town—looks like black glass with chips of ruby in it: garnets, they are. And wherever there's volcanic rock, there's shafts and chimneys.”

“The chances of two men ever—”

“It's just a hypothetical case,” Mary said soothingly. “A way of passing the time, that's all.”

“Hypothetical bullshit,” Audrey grumbled, and ate another dubious pretzel.

“Anyway, that's the story,” Billingsley said, “miners buried alive, two get out, both insane by then, and they try to take their revenge. Later on, ghosts in the ground. If that ain't a tale for a stormy night, I don't know what is.” He looked across at Audrey, and on his face was a sly drunk's smile. “You been diggin up there, miss. You new folks. Haven't come across any short bones, have you?”

“You're drunk, Mr. Billingsley,” she said coldly.

“No,” he said. “I wish I was, but I ain't. Excuse me, ladies and gents. I get yarning and I get the whizzies. It never damn fails.”

He crossed the stage, head down, shoulders slumped, weaving slightly. The shadow which followed him was ironic both in its size and its heroic aspect. His bootheels clumped. They watched him go.

There was a sudden flat smacking sound that made them all jump. Cynthia smiled guiltily and raised her sneaker. “Sorry,” she said. “A spider. I think it was one of those fiddleheads.”

“Fiddle
backs,
” Steve said.

Johnny bent down to look, hands planted on his legs just above the knees. “Nope.”

“Nope, what?” Steve asked. “Not a fiddleback?”

“Not a singleton,” Johnny said. “A pair.” He looked up, not quite smiling. “Maybe,” he said, “they're
Chinese
fiddlebacks.”

3

Tak!
Can ah wan me.
Ah lah.

The cougar's eyes opened. She got up. Her tail began switching restlessly from side to side. It was almost time. Her ears cocked forward, twitching, at the sound of someone entering the room behind the white glass. She looked up at it, all rapt attention, a net of measurement and focus. Her leap would have to be perfect to carry her through, and perfection was exactly what the voice in her head demanded.

She waited, that small, squalling growl once more rising up from her throat . . . but now it came out of her mouth as well as from her nostrils, because her muzzle was wrinkled back to show her teeth. Little by little, she began to tense down on her haunches.

Almost time.

Almost time.

Tak ah ten.

4

Billingsley poked his head into
the ladies' first, and shone his light at the window. The bottles were still in place. He had been afraid that a strong gust of wind might open the window wide enough to knock some of them off the ledge, causing a false alarm, but that hadn't happened and now he thought it very unlikely that it would. The wind was dying. The storm, a summer freak the likes of which he had never seen, was winding down.

Meantime, he had this problem. This thirst to quench.

Except, in the last five years or so, it had come to seem less and less like a thirst than an
itch,
as if he had contracted some awful form of poison ivy—a kind that affected one's brain instead of one's skin. Well, it didn't matter, did it? He knew how to take care of his problem, and that was the important thing. And it kept his mind off the rest, as well. The madness of the rest. If it had just been danger, someone out of control waving a gun around, that he thought he could have faced, old or not, drunk or not. But this was nothing so cut and dried. The geologist woman kept insisting that it
was,
that it was all Entragian, but Billingsley knew better. Because Entragian was different now. He'd told the others that, and Ellen Carver had called him crazy. But . . .

But
how
was Entragian different? And why did he, Billingsley, somehow feel that the change in the deputy was important, perhaps vital, to them right now? He didn't know. He
should
know, it should be as clear as the nose on his face, but these days when he drank everything got swimmy, like he was going senile. He couldn't even remember the name of the geologist woman's horse, the mare with the strained leg—

“Yes I can,” he murmured. “Yes I can, it was . . .”

Was
what,
you old rummy? You don't know, do you?

“Yes I do, it was Sally!” he cried triumphantly, then walked past the boarded-up firedoor and pushed his way into the men's room. He shone his flashlight briefly on the potty. “Sally, that's what it was!” He shifted his light to the wall and the smoke-breathing horse which galloped there. He couldn't remember drawing it—he'd been in a blackout, he supposed—but it was indubitably his work, and not bad of its kind. He liked the way the horse looked both mad and free, as if it had come from some other world where goddesses still rode bareback, sometimes leaping whole leagues as they went their wild courses.

His memories suddenly clarified a little, as if the picture on the wall had somehow opened his mind. Sally, yes. A year ago, give or take. The rumors that the mine was going to be reopened were just beginning to solidify into acknowledged fact. Cars and trucks had started to show up in the parking lot of the Quonset hut that served as mining headquarters, planes had started to fly into the airstrip south of town, and he had been told one night—right here in The American West, as a matter of fact, drinking with the boys—that there was a lady geologist living out at the old Rieper place. Young. Single. Supposedly pretty.

Billingsley needed to pee, he hadn't lied, but that wasn't his strongest need right now. There was a filthy blue rag in one of the washbasins, the sort of thing you wouldn't handle without tongs unless you absolutely needed to. The old veterinarian now plucked it up, exposing a bottle of Satin Smooth, rotgut whiskey if ever rotgut whiskey had been bottled . . . but any port in a storm.

He unscrewed the cap and then, holding the bottle in both hands because of the way they were shaking, took a long, deep drink. Napalm slid down his throat and exploded in his gut. It burned, all right, but what was that Patty Loveless song that used to play all the time on the radio? Hurt me, baby, in a real good way.

He chased the first gulp with a smaller sip (holding the bottle easier, now; the shakes were gone), then replaced the cap and put the bottle back in the sink.

“She called me,” he muttered. Outside the window, the cougar's ears flicked at the sound of his voice. She tensed down a little more on her haunches, waiting for him to move closer to where she was, closer to where her leap would bring her. “Woman called me on the phone. Said her horse was a three-year-old mare named Sally. Yessir.”

He put the rag back over the bottle, not thinking about it, hiding by habit, his mind on that day last summer. He had gone out to the Rieper place, a nice adobe up in the hills, and a fellow from the mine—the black guy who later became the office receptionist, in fact—had taken him to the horse. He said Audrey had just gotten an urgent call and was going to have to fly off to company headquarters in Phoenix. Then, as they walked to the stable, the black fellow had looked over Billingsley's shoulder and had said . . .

“He said, ‘There she goes now,' ” Billingsley murmured. He had again focused the light on the horse galloping across the warped tiles and was staring at it with wide, remembering eyes, his bladder temporarily forgotten. “And he called to her.”

Yessir.
Hi, Aud!
he'd called, and waved. She had waved back. Billingsley had also waved, thinking the stories were right: she
was
young, and she
was
goodlooking. Not moviestar-knockout goodlooking, but mighty fine for a part of the world where
no
single woman had to pay for her own drinks if she didn't want to. He had tended her horse, had given the black man a liniment sample to put on, and later she'd come in herself to buy more. Marsha had told him that; he'd been over near Washoe, looking after some sick sheep. He'd seen her around town plenty since, though. Not to talk to, nosir, not hardly, they ran with different crowds, but he'd seen her eating dinner in the Antlers Hotel or the Owl's, once at The Jailhouse in Ely; he'd seen her drinking in Bud's Suds or the Drum with some of the other mining folk, rolling dice out of a cup to see who'd pay; in Worrell's Market, buying groceries, at the Conoco, buying gas, in the hardware store one day, buying a can of paint and a brush, yessir, he had seen her around, in a town this small and this isolated you saw
everybody
around, had to.

Why are you running all this through your dumb head?
he asked himself, at last starting toward the potty. His boots gritted in dirt and dust, in grout that had crumbled out from between decaying tiles. He stopped still a little bit beyond aiming-and-shooting distance, flashlight beam shining on the scuffed tip of one boot while he pulled down his fly. What did Audrey Wyler have to do with Collie? What
could
she have to do with Collie? He didn't recall ever seeing them together, or hearing that they were an item, it wasn't that. So what
was
it? And why did his mind keep insisting it had something to do with the day he'd gone out to look at her mare? He hadn't even
seen
her that day. Well . . . for a minute . . . from a distance . . .

He lined himself up with the potty and pulled out the old hogleg. Boy, he had to go. Drink a pint and piss a quart, wasn't that what they said?

Her waving . . . hurrying for her car . . . headed for the airstrip . . . headed for Phoenix. Wearing a business-suity kind of rig, sure, because she wasn't going to any Quonset hut mining headquarters out in the desert, she was going someplace where there was a carpet on the floor and the view was from more than three stories up. Going to see the big boys. Nice legs she had . . . I'm getting on but I ain't too old to appreciate a pretty knee . . . nice, yessir, but—

And suddenly it all came together in his mind, not with a click but with a big loud
ka-pow,
and for a moment, before the cougar uttered her coughing, rising growl, he thought the sound of breaking glass was in his mind, that it was the sound of understanding.

Then the growl began, quickly rising to a howl that started him urinating in pure fear. For a moment it was impossible to associate that sound with anything which had ever walked on the earth. He wheeled, spraying a pin-wheel of piss, and saw a dark, green-eyed shape splayed out on the tiles. Bits of broken glass gleamed in the fur on its back. He knew what it was immediately, his mind quickly putting the shape together with the sound in spite of his startlement and terror.

The mountain lion—the flashlight showed it to be an extremely large female—raised her face to his and spat at him, revealing two rows of long white teeth. And the .30-.06 was back on the stage, leaned up against the movie screen.

“Oh my God
no,
” Billingsley whispered, and threw the flashlight past the cougar's right shoulder, missing it intentionally. When the snarling animal snapped its head around to see what had been thrown at it, Billingsley broke for the door.

He ran with his head down, tucking himself back into his pants with the hand that had been holding the flashlight. The cougar loosed another of its screaming, distraught cries—the shriek of a woman being burned or stabbed, deafening in the closed bathroom—and then launched herself at Billingsley, front paws splayed, long claws out. These sank through his shirt and into his back as he groped for the doorhandle, slicing through scant muscle, flaying him in bloodlines that came together like a V. Her big paws snagged in the waistband of his pants and held for a moment, pulling the old man—who was screaming himself now—back into the room. Then his belt broke and he went tumbling backward, actually landing on top of the cougar. He rolled, hit the glass-littered floor on his side, got to one knee, and then the cougar was on him. She knocked him onto his back and went for his throat. Billingsley got his hand up and she bit off the side of it. Blood beaded on her whiskers like skarn-garnets. Billingsley screamed again and shoved his other hand under the shelf of her chin, trying to push her back, trying to make her let go. He felt her breath on his cheek, pushing like hot fingers. He looked past her shoulder and saw the horse on the wall,
his
horse, prancing wild and free. Then the cougar lunged forward again, shaking his hand in her jaws, and there was only pain. It filled the world.