by Thomas Zigal
“Randy, why don’t you go ahead with the others,” Kat said. “I’ll catch up in a minute.”
Randy touched the bill of her cap in a finger salute. “Will do, boss,” she said.
Kat waited until the woman was several yards away before speaking. “I didn’t expect to see you up here today,” she said, sliding her hands into her jeans.
“I didn’t expect to be here. I’ve got to get on back to work.”
“Don’t leave yet,” she said, a surprising softness in her request. “Come take a walk with me.”
Her limp appeared a burden on this rocky, uneven trail, the path descending and rising like the dorsal of a great lizard. She breathed heavily, her mouth open, her lungs struggling with the exertion in thinner air. He wondered if they should slow down and give her a rest.
“I was going to call you today,” she said, pressing on. “I didn’t like the way we left things last night. I’m sorry I got so angry and defensive.”
“It was my fault. My approach wasn’t very diplomatic.”
“I want you to know I didn’t have anything to do with Ned Carr’s death and I don’t know who did.”
He stopped and smiled at her. He felt enormously relieved that she was being so direct. “Actually, Kat,” he said, “I couldn’t imagine that you were involved. But it was a good excuse to see you again. Twenty years is a long time.”
Three mountain bikers rolled slowly around them, stirring dust. He wanted to ask her why she’d never written. Why she had let him go.
“I understand you have a son now.”
He could feel his face glowing. “Lennon,” he said. “He’s a great kid.”
“Is he old enough to fly-fish?”
When she was Lennon’s age, her brother Jake and the two Muller boys had taken her down to the creek behind the Pfeil cabin and shown her how to cast a fly. Kurt remembered that morning with remarkable clarity.
“We’ve made a few trips to the Fryingpan,” he said. “He’s more interested in afternoon TV.”
“I’d like to meet him,” she said. “Why don’t you bring him out tomorrow and we’ll see if the rainbows are biting in the creek?”
She was making an effort to be friendly. “That’s an invitation I won’t turn down,” he said. “Do you mind if we bring along Ned’s grandson? He’s staying with us now.”
She removed the ludicrous owl-eye glasses. The alpine breeze fingered the dark hair away from her face. A lone bead of sweat trickled down her cheek. “Marie’s son?” she asked with a frown.
He nodded. They had all attended the same Aspen schools for twelve years. Marie was a grade behind Kurt, two ahead of Kat. Everyone knew each other.
“Who is the boy’s father?”
“I’m not sure anybody knows,” Kurt said. “You remember what a free spirit Marie was when we were young. Well, she never slowed down. She had a weakness for the old freaks who make candles and hang around Renaissance fairs.”
Kat smiled at some long-forgotten memory. “I always liked Marie. She organized the first Donovan fan club in the valley. We actually tried to get a mellow-yellow high off a stick of Juicy Fruit mushed in a rotten banana.”
“I think I still have one of those in my deep freeze, if you want to split it with me.”
She laughed and took his arm as they began walking again. He understood that her embrace was less an act of endearment than a need for physical support.
“My wife and I were with her in the same birthing class. She always came alone. I don’t recall her ever mentioning a steady man in her life.” He smiled sadly, remembering Marie’s frantic energy, her effort to become the perfect single mother. “She picked Meg to be her breathing coach during Hunter’s birth. We got the babies together in our playtime circle. At the time of the accident she was raising him by herself in an old house the other side of Mountain Valley.”
Though he had tried to avoid such morbid reflection, Kurt sometimes found himself picturing the last moments of Marie’s life. The wall of snow hurling her three hundred feet down the pass, snapping her bones, churning her body in ice as thick as wet cement. He was certain her final thoughts had been of her son, his name a mantra until the darkness rushed over her.
“The boy was living with Ned?” Kat asked.
“He was probably a better father to Hunter than he’d been to his own kids.”
“The poor child must be traumatized beyond belief.”
“So far, so good,” Kurt said.
They had drawn near the party. Friends of the Forest, a hundred green socialites adorned as their favorite birds, strutting between tables, pecking at food. Randy was standing alone on a rock ledge thirty yards beyond the gathering, peering southward down into Annie Basin with her field binoculars.
“How do you know Meredith?” he asked Kat.
“Everybody in the movement knows Meredith,” she said. “She was raising hell long before the rest of us.” She watched the gathering with a bemused smile. “Though frankly I don’t understand her marriage.”
“The environmentalists now have one of the wealthiest men in the world on their side.”
“Mmm,” she said, a pondering nod. “Patronage for sex. I believe there’s a name for that, Kurt.”
He smiled, held up a hand. “Whoa. I thought you were friends. She seems very fond of you.”
“We’re friends,” Kat said firmly. “I hate to sound so judgmental. I guess I’m just not willing to go that far for a cause.”
The media had always portrayed Katrina Pfeil as someone who would do anything to further her issues. She had once chained herself to the top of an old-growth redwood. The Forest Service and the local Sheriff’s Department spent two long days trying to haul her down.
“I wouldn’t be too hard on her,” he said. “Maybe she’s really in love with the guy.”
“Ah, yes, love. It makes fools of us all, doesn’t it?”
They began walking again, quieted by her melancholy mood. Two mountain bikers, a young couple fit as Norsemen, called out a warning and swerved around them. Kurt wondered if people his age ever fell head over heels in love. He felt so intractable now, his passions buried, atrophied by neglect. He wasn’t sure he could recognize the signs anymore.
“Miles ran me off the road heading for your place last night,” he said.
She smiled at something distant and dreamy. “I’ve known Miles since I was a college kid,” she said. “I took a photography course from him one summer. It consisted of our class hiking up to remote lakes, eating peyote, and listening to Jimi Hendrix tapes. Miles was trying to free us from the frame.”
“Did he tell you about my visit to his bunker?”
“Sure,” she shrugged. “He thinks you’ve become a fascist cop.”
“Is that what you think too?”
She stopped and studied his eyes. “I think your job must be very hard on you,” she said, touching his cheek affectionately. “I hope it hasn’t made you cynical. You were always a sweetheart.”
Her face was flushed and damp. She raked her hands through her dark hair and it stayed pulled back, moistened by the hike. He pictured her slender body rising from the steam, the lovely sway of her waist and hips. In his memory there were no scars.
“I found Carr’s other mine,” Randy said, adjusting the binoculars.
Ned’s stubborn enterprise had carved a barren spot in the fir forest two hundred yards below, the mine’s adit surrounded by a slide area of gray silt that looked like the churned-up leavings of an enormous dirt-boring insect.
“The Lone Ute,” Kurt said. “That cabin is where he lived.”
The three of them were standing together on the rock ledge, staring down at the woodlands enveloping the backside of Aspen Mountain. A brisk spring wind rippled their clothes.
“Have a look at his sludge pond,” Randy said, passing the binoculars to Kat. “What a lovely sight.”
Kurt didn’t need the glasses to find the pond, its surface as black and motionless as a tar pit. “For thi
rty years Ned let the weather wash his lead tailings down the mountain,” he said, “until the EPA came along and made him put in that pond to collect the waste. Now the thing is leaking arsenic and sulfuric acid into the aquifer.”
He had never understood the old man’s strange romantic obsession with holes in the ground. What on earth had possessed him to undertake so much trouble, cause so much destruction and ill will, over so little return?
“Randy, if you walk into any hotel lobby in town you’ll see photographs of how Aspen Mountain looked a hundred years ago,” he said. “Those old hardrock stiffs didn’t give a damn how ugly the land got as long as they were pulling up high-grade silver. When our parents came here after the war, the mountain was still crisscrossed with muddy mining roads, and the old chutes and headframes were falling to pieces everywhere you looked.”
Kat searched Annie Basin with the binoculars. “The last good thing the Rumpf people did for the mountain was clean up the junk, seal off the mines, and give nature a chance to heal herself.”
Kurt knew she had never been fond of her father and considered the entire early ski venture its own violation of the mountain.
“So how did this guy Ned get away with what he was doing?” Randy asked.
“The friggin’ Mining Law of 1872,” Kat said.
Kurt smiled at her. In their childhood they had heard their parents explain and condemn the law in a thousand angry conversations. He and Kat could issue a brief on the subject.
“To keep up a valid claim,” he said, “all you have to show is a hundred dollars’ worth of mine work a year. At least Ned was actually working his two shafts, waiting for silver to hit ten bucks an ounce someday so he could get serious about it. There was a guy named Cameron around the turn of the century who staked claims in the Grand Canyon, but instead of mining he built a hotel and livery business on the south rim and charged sightseers admission to use the trails. It took Teddy Roosevelt and the courts fifteen years to shut the bastard down.”
“The Mining Law was supposed to stimulate western expansion,” Kat added, lowering the binoculars. “The agenda being to draw white people out to the godforsaken badlands to civilize the place. The original framers of the law would probably be surprised that a hundred and twenty-odd years later you can still get public land at 1872 prices, five dollars an acre. The title is yours free and clear—no government lease payments, no royalties to the national kitty—as long as you keep up the pretense you’re mining.”
Kurt could see sunlight shimmering off the tin roof of Ned’s cabin down in the basin. When the deputies searched the place last night, they’d found no obvious signs of theft or vandalism. It seemed unlikely that the ponytailed man was a common looter—the cabin’s remote location didn’t lend itself to the average hit-and-run burglar. So what was he doing there?
“Six hundred million acres have been lost to the Mining Law,” Kat said, shaking her head. “In the late nineteen thirties the Forest Service concluded that eighty-five percent of the claims hadn’t produced a single nugget. A GAO study a couple of years ago showed that nobody had hit a shovel lick in eighty percent of the million claims they looked at. We’re talking about con artists buying up sizable parcels of public land that have a fair-market value worth literally forty thousand times the five bucks an acre—land that belongs to you and me—and using it for their own personal gain. Condos, hunting lodges, pot farms. It’s the biggest scam going, but the corporate mining lobby has stomped on every effort at reform. They don’t want to pay what the land’s worth, or kick in royalties to the federal government.”
“When silver was money and the whole world wanted it,” Kurt said, “the law made sense. Men like Ned were doing what the microchip people are doing now. Filling a need, changing the future.”
Randy squatted down and poked at the hard shale with a stick she’d found. “And as usual,” she said, “leaving a mess for the mothers to clean up.”
Chapter sixteen
Tyler Rutledge knew it was only a matter of time until someone made contact with him. The message had come from an unlikely source, a sheriff’s deputy who had stopped Tyler’s truck on the highway and told him that an unnamed party was interested in arranging a meeting. Tyler wadded up the warning ticket and tossed it back at the cop. “Somebody wants to talk to me,” he said, “they can find me working the Lone Ute most any morning.”
He was mucking loose rock near the top of a deep stope, forty yards inside the shaft, when he heard footsteps approaching, quiet voices echoing against the stone walls. He grabbed the twelve-gauge, pumped a shell into the chamber, and climbed quickly up the ladder to the main drift to wait for them behind an ore car. The floodlights were strong here and air from a five-inch ventilation hose cooled his wet shirt and sweating face.
Someone called his name. He didn’t respond. Two men soon appeared in the tunnel, shielded their eyes against the blinding light, and stepped back out of the glare. “Sorry to drop in unannounced,” said a tall, suave gray-haired man, his hands tucked in the pockets of a khaki fisherman’s vest. “We didn’t know how else to reach you, Tyler.”
Tyler shrugged and pulled the Red Man pouch from his hip pocket. “You reached me,” he said, fitting a wad into the corner of his mouth. “What’s on your mind, boys? I got work to do.”
“I think you’ve already met my associate.”
The bearded man emerged from the shadows and smiled. “Hello, Tyler,” he said, his small eyes disappearing into high, fatty cheekbones. Today he was wearing flannel instead of the cammo flak jacket. “How’s your shuffleboard game?”
Tyler reached for the pump shotgun and braced it on the lip of the ore car. “What do you want?” he said, releasing the safety with an audible click. “You got about sixty seconds before I consider you a couple of dead trespassers.”
“Relax, son,” said the gray-haired man. “We’re here to extend a friendly invitation. Our client would like to meet you. He’s very interested in your future and is looking forward to working things out between you. He would be delighted if you’d be his guest for a few days. Call it a working vacation. Do you play golf?”
Tyler spit a stream of juice into the dirt. “Fuck golf,” he said.
“Our client has considerable resources at his disposal, Tyler. I’m sure he can offer something in the way of recreation that will suit your pleasure. Why don’t you let us arrange a get-together? Think of it as a nice break from”—he gazed around the narrow mine shaft—“your labor,” he said. “This partnership is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, my friend, and believe me, everybody’s going to walk away happy once the details are smoothed out.”
Tyler didn’t like the way this man talked. He sounded like a lawyer. Slick, condescending, the kind of silver-tongued bureaucrat who was making life miserable for everybody.
“Ned told me about your boss. He had a swell time drinking margaritas and playing all-night poker with the boss and his buddies.”
“I’m sure he did,” the gray-haired man smiled.
“And then he wound up dead.”
The smile evaporated when Tyler raised the shotgun to his shoulder and aimed. “So which one of you motherfuckers rewired the charge?”
He watched the bearded fellow turn slowly and look back down the shaft toward the entrance.
“Take it easy, son,” said the gray-haired man. “There’s something in this for everyone. Why don’t you at least come and hear what my client has to say?”
“Go tell your client to kiss my ass,” Tyler said, sighting down the barrel at the man’s chest. “Tell him if I ever find out for sure he killed my partner, I’m coming after him.”
“You’re making a foolish mistake here, Tyler. I wish I could talk some sense into you.”
Tyler nudged the shotgun up and down. “Get off this property,” he said, “and take the knuckle-dragger with you.”
The bearded man grinned at Tyler’s remark and turned again, waving his arm in a signal to someone back at th
e entrance. “Didn’t your old man ever teach you not to point a gun at people?” he said with a threatening growl.
Then the mine went dark.
Chapter seventeen
The first two reports sounded like doors slamming in the distance. They were followed by three echoing cracks and a quick blurt of gunfire.
“Jesus Christ!” Kat said. “Somebody’s shooting down there.”
“Where?” Kurt said, grabbing the binoculars from her. He scanned the woodland slope and discovered a puff of gray smoke drifting up from the Lone Ute adit. A Toyota 4 x 4 was spinning off past Ned’s cabin, retreating rapidly into the trees. Where the hell was the deputy assigned to the place?
“Three men were running from the mine!” Kat said.
Kurt tossed her the binoculars. “Keep watching!” he said.
Racing over to the picnic tables, he shouted, “Who’s got a cell phone? This is a police emergency! Does anybody have a cell phone?”
A half-dozen bird men produced phones.
“Phil, call nine-one-one and tell the Sheriff’s Department to send deputies to the Lone Ute Mine,” he instructed an architect whose kid played on their soccer team. “Tell the dispatcher the situation looks dangerous and there may be weapons involved. One of our men might be down.”
A hush fell over the party. Kurt pulled the shield from his hip pocket and held it up to a trio of mountain bikers wheeling along the path nearby. “Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department!” he said, slowing them to a stop. “I need your bike.”
“No way, dude,” said an incredulous young man wearing a Day-Glo Lycra riding suit.
“You’ll get it back,” Kurt said, taking hold of the handlebar. “If anything happens to it, the department will reimburse you.”
The rider began to protest. He didn’t expect Kurt to rip his bicycle out from under him. “Hey, man, you can’t do that!” the young man shouted.
Kurt peddled quickly over to the rock ledge, where Kat stood peering down at the forest below. “I don’t see anybody, Kurt,” she said, the binoculars pressed to her eyes. “There was a truck but it’s gone.”
