The Regulators (39 page)

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
A
TV. 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
A
TV 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 of the mine on his skin . . . that campfire smell, 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 drive-by 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 days 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 underhill (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 keychain 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!

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.

“You all right, Doc?” Audrey asked.

“Yeah,” Billingsley said. “Right as rain. Aren't I, Susi?”

“Sure,” Susi Geller agreed nervously. Then, through the fence: “Mrs. Wyler, is that you? Where did
you
come from?”

“That doesn't matter right now. We need to—”

“What happened out there? Is everyone all right? My mom is having a cow. A
large
one.”

Is everyone all right.
That was a question Brad didn't want to answer. No one else did either, from the look.

“Mrs. Reed?” Johnny asked. “David next, then you?”

Cammie gave him her dry stare, then turned back to Dave. She murmured in his ear once more, stroking his hair as she did so. Dave listened with a troubled expression, then murmured back, just loud enough for Brad to hear, “I don't want to.” She murmured again, more vehemently this time. Brad caught the words
your brother
near the end. This time Dave reached up, grabbed the top of the fence, and swung himself smoothly over to the other side. He did it, so far as Brad could see, with no expression save that look of faint unease on his face. Cammie went next, Audrey and Cynthia boosting. As she gained the top, Dave's hands rose to meet her. Cammie slipped into them, making no effort to keep hold of the fence for safety's sake. Brad had an idea that at this point she might have actually welcomed a fall. Maybe even a broken neck.
Why did you send us out here, Ma?
the kid had shouted, perhaps intuiting that his own eagerness to go—and Jim's—would never serve as a mitigating circumstance in her mind. Cammie would always blame herself, and he would probably always be willing to let her.

“Brad?” That was a voice he was glad to hear, although he rarely heard it sound so soft and worried. “You there, hon?”

“I'm here, Bee.”

“You okay?”

“Fine. Listen, Bee, and don't lose your cool. Jim Reed is dead. So's Entragian from down the street.”

There was a gasp, and then Susi Geller was screaming Jim's name over and over again. To Brad, who was emotionally as well as physically exhausted, those screams roused annoyance rather than pity . . . and the fear that they might draw something even less pleasant than the big cat or the coyote with the human fingers.

“Susi?” The alarmed voice of Kim Geller from the house. Then she was screaming, too, the sound seeming to cut the moonlit air like a sharp whirling blade:
“Soooooo-zeeeeee! Sooooo-zeeeeee!”

“Shut up!”
Johnny yelled.
“Jesus, Kim,
SHUT UP
!”

For a wonder she did, but the girl went on and on, shrieking like a misbegotten fifth-act Juliet.

“Dear God,” Audrey muttered. She put her palms over her ears and ran her fingers into her hair.

“Bee,” Brad said through the fence, “shut that Chicken Little up. I don't care how.”

“
JIM
!”
Susi screamed,
“
OHHHH GAWWWD, JIM! OH GAWWWD NO! OH
—”

There was a slap. The screams were cut off almost at once. Then:

“You can't hit my
daughter
! You can't hit my
daughter,
you bitch, I don't care what ideas you've gotten from . . . from affirmative action! You fat black
bitch
!”

“Oh fuck me til I cry,” Cynthia said. She clutched her own double-dyed hair and squeezed her eyes shut like a kid who doesn't want to watch the final few minutes of a scary movie.

Brad kept his open and held his breath, waiting for Bee to go nuclear. Instead, Bee ignored the woman, calling softly through the fence: “Are you sending his body over, Bradley?” She sounded completely composed, for which Brad was completely thankful.

“Yeah. You and his mother and his brother catch hold of him when we do.”

“We will.” Still cool as a cucumber fresh out of the crock.

“Kim?” Brad called through the stakes of the fence. “Mrs. Geller? Why don't you go on in the house, ma'am?”