He said, "I am an honest Illinois man with the richest claim in the valley. And I will make you a queen."
"Is that true?" Charlotte murmured to McCoy.
McCoy's eyes smoldered as he examined the competition. The other men would pounce on any self-serving lie. "It's possible," McCoy said at last.
A day later, Charlotte accompanied Paul up the valley to the Long Shot Lode. They barely had time to tie down the canvas roof on his log-sided tent and stack up firewood before the snow came hurling down the mountainside, burying the valley. Paul scratched holes in the frozen earth. Charlotte hauled buckets of rock. The wind cut through the forest, through the walls of their tent, right through their clothing. It seemed to scour their very bones. On the coldest days, they never left their fireside.
Paul spoke as though they were rich, but whenever Charlotte wondered what was real, she just looked at her calloused hands, felt the knots in her shoulders. That was real. There wasn't any gold in her calloused hands. There wasn't any mink on her knotted shoulders. Gold, she was beginning to suspect, was just another fairy-tale. Unfortunately, she was snowed in, stuck with Paul until spring.
One day, however, Paul came running from the cave with a lump of gold half the size of his thumb. It was shaped like a bear, with tiny bear claws and an eye that gazed at Charlotte askance. Tears ran down Charlotte's face as she imagined that maybe they would be rich after all.
Not long after, Paul started coughing. Green gobs of his phlegm dotted the cabin's dirt floor. Then one day he couldn't get up. Charlotte nursed him impartially and dreamed of the day he would die and set her free. In his delirium, he fixated on the Golden Bear. He told her of the Indian warning about taking things from the cave. He begged her to fling the gold bear back where it came from.
When she couldn't stand his whining any longer, she snatched up the gold bear, marched away and thrust it under a stone just inside the cave's mouth. She was careful to mark the spot so that she could retrieve it later.
The next day, he died. It took all of her strength to drag his body through the snow. She left him under a pile of brush near his brother's grave. Wolves scattered his bones through the frozen aspen grove. For weeks, she heard them snarling and howling at night. She never left the cabin without a gun.
Once, she shot a hare. Another time, a squirrel. Mostly, she made bread in a Dutch oven on the fire pit and fed the fire and stared at the rough log walls, the leaky canvas roof, the snow that blew through the cracks and dusted the floor. And while she sat there, she told herself the story of her life, and the story of her glorious future.
She talked about her days as she went through them, and she answered herself, too. The conversations were most engaging when she argued.
She started to miss Paul, in spite of herself. His ranting had given her new things to think about. Caring for him had given her a purpose. The dim warmth of his frail body next to her on their pine bough bunk had comforted her at night.
And when the snow melted, Charlotte found that the word had got out about the Long Shot Lode. The valley flooded with new prospectors and a tent city sprang up around her almost overnight. They called the town Long Shot. Charlotte realized that mining would make her rich after all. Men could mine the ground. She would mine the men.
Word spread that Charlotte had been widowed once again. Men trailed her around like puppies. McCoy was one of her first callers. He brought her a burro laden with bacon, beans, tea and a bolt of the most beautiful sky blue wool. God only knew where he had found such a thing.
As she wolfed down beans, she rejected his proposal. After all, she'd been married twice already and she was starting to think marriage wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Eyeing that beautiful bolt of cloth, Charlotte proposed something altogether different: a business partnership. McCoy took what he could get.
She left the gold bear in the cave. If things fell apart, she could always find it again. It was her secret ticket out. But it was a tricky ticket. After all, it might be cursed, from what Paul had said. Charlotte had spent many hours mulling it over as she stared into the fire that past winter. And it was a heck of a coincidence that Paul died as soon as she had returned the bear to the cave. Up until then, she had been trapped.
Charlotte and McCoy invested the rest of McCoy's money in four chipped drinking glasses and two barrels of Taos Lightning (laced with pepper, tobacco and gunpowder). By Charlotte's door, they hung a sign: "Long Shot Saloon."
The saloon was a hit. But Charlotte knew the men didn't come just for whiskey. They came to look at her. What fools! Sometimes, she let her gown slip at little off her shoulder, hitched it up above her knees as she lounged on her bed of pine boughs, chattering cheerfully. McCoy collected their pinches of gold dust and doled out Taos Lightning.
Surprisingly, many miners did strike gold in the valley. Most of their newfound wealth funneled to Charlotte. A man worked seventeen hours of the day, drank away each day's earnings at the Long Shot Saloon. The business thrived. Charlotte sent for more whiskey and built a two-story addition with a proper roof.
In spite of all her misgivings, she fell in love with McCoy. She held firm on the subject of marriage, though. Whenever he proposed, she said, "Respectability would be bad for business, McCoy." She never called him by his given name.
Over the next year, they built a line of shacks out back for working girls and hauled in a piano. They hired a bouncer, then two, grubstaked miners. Their doors never closed, and they set out a free buffet every afternoon. Why give the customers a reason to leave?
Charlotte brought in a consultant from Denver to take a look at her cave. He confirmed something that Charlotte had long suspected: the Long Shot Mine would never yield gold. The geology of it was all wrong.
To keep people out, she had the cave sealed with a vault door and built a new establishment on top of it, snug up to the cliff. This one was classy. They called it the Long Shot Hotel.
Down in the cave, behind that vault door, the loot piled up: leather bags full of gold dust and nuggets, silver, coins, jewels, guns. Charlotte wasn't picky about how her customers paid, as long as they paid lavishly. And under it all was the Golden Bear. Was it a curse or a good luck charm? She wasn't sure, so she kept it there in a wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl.
Hillsides spilled piles of lurid orange and yellow dirt. A haze of smoke hung over town.
On Charlotte's twentieth birthday, the elaborate mirrored oak bar arrived from New York, hauled by a team of oxen. Around it, Charlotte built a magnificent sandstone hotel, a first-class resort with every luxury: running water, fireplaces and gas lights. Later she added electricity and an elevator.
It was five stories tall, with casement windows to catch the light, and a porticoed entryway accessed by shallow sandstone steps. Heavy glass and oak doors led into a tiled lobby with a mosaic ceiling. On the second floor were the grand oak bar and gambling salons.
Furnishings of velvet and leather and crystal were imported from Europe.
The working girls moved their trunks of tacky clothes to the third and fourth floors. The sheriff and the preacher did their business at the bar.
Charlotte tired of men ogling her, grabbing her breasts, all the suggestive remarks they thought were so clever. She had her portrait painted, nude, on the wall above the bar. That way, the men could still ogle her, but she could focus on running the business.
She hired and fired, ordered supplies, bribed politicians, broke up fights. From noon to dawn every day she worked, and she was good at it. McCoy was more suited to drinking and gambling.
Chapter 5
From the beginning, Long Shot had more than its share of sudden rises and falls of fortune, coincidences and catastrophes. Whatever happened there, happened on a large scale. The weather changed in half a day from balmy to blizzard. Forests burned. Mines exploded. People disappeared, rioted, dueled.
They said that life was hard and unpredictable on the frontier, and that perhaps L
ong Shot was no worse than anywhere else. So although there was talk, everyone still wanted to try their luck in Long Shot. Where else could you make your fortune in a day?
Early one morning when the smell of champagne and cigars lingered in the silent salons, Charlotte recorded the night's takings at her writing desk in her office behind the bar.
McCoy stuck his head in the doorway. "You look tired, My Love. Go to bed. I'll take care of the rest."
Bleary eyed, she nodded, unhooked the skeleton key she kept chained to her waist. He hefted the two leather pouches of gold, took the key from her hand.
She started toward her private apartment on the fifth floor, then doubled back and tailed him silently down the stairs to the kitchen, where the light of his candle flickered in an icy breeze as he eased open the side door.
Delicate gloved hands took one of the sacks from McCoy. The ribboned hem of a skirt caught the candle light for just a moment and swished away. Charlotte knew that skirt. It belonged to Big Peg, one of her working girls, who had left her just two days before with a story of a sick mother and tears in her eyes. False tears.
Charlotte let McCoy dally with the girls. He was a man, after all. But he couldn't just hand them sacks of gold.
McCoy set the remaining bag on the floor just inside the door. Charlotte tailed him down the stone steps to the dark basement, where the cave entrance was sealed by a steel vault door. She watched as he set the candle holder on a shelf and unlocked the heavy door. When he emerged seconds later with two more sacks of gold, Charlotte stepped forward, blocking his way. He froze.
She said, "I was surprised when you offered to help. Usually, you're in bed by now, with Peg."
The pearl-handled pistol she drew from her bodice leapt in her hand, making a startlingly unfeminine bang.
Oh, my God, I've shot him, she thought, as he sagged forward and dropped the sacks.
She hadn't really made up her mind whether she was going to do that or not, but her finger had done it anyway.
"Please don't kill me," he choked.
"Don't you be making me the bad guy," she said as she wrenched the key from the lock with shaking hands and looped the keychain around his neck. What right did he have to make her feel guilty? There was a baby growing under Charlotte’s skirt and McCoy was trying to leave.
She pulled the chain tight to silence his pleas, then dragged him through the door. She untangled the chain from his hair and beard, shoved the dropped bags of gold in after him and locked him inside. Then she picked up the pistol and the candle. On her way upstairs, Charlotte stopped by the side door and gazed down at the sack of gold there for a moment. Then she cracked open the door and whistled softly.
Sure enough, Big Peg slipped from the shadows. Charlotte thrust the bag of gold at her and said: "McCoy won't be keeping his appointment with you."
"I'm sorry ma'am. I didn't--"
"I don't want to hear it."
Charlotte bolted the door and went up to her room. Indignation surged through her veins. But she knew that she'd handled the situation correctly. Tomorrow or the next day, she would confide to one of her girls that McCoy and Big Peg had run off together. No one would look for him after that. It happened all the time, especially to old ladies of twenty-one.
Why had she let Peg take the money? Charlotte lay awake wondering. Maybe because it would keep her mouth shut, stop her looking for McCoy and get her out of town.
That afternoon, Charlotte put on her stoutest boots and least stylish gown, wrapped her head in a cotton scarf and let herself into the vault.
She was careful not to look at McCoy's dead body.
Paul had told her an interesting story before he fell ill, of a secret passage that led from the cave to a mystical other world. Charlotte had watched him stack rocks to seal off a gap at the base of the cavern wall.
Charlotte didn't buy into his talk of a mystical other world, but in spite of herself, she was relieved when the barrier was completed. The sweet, cold air that breathed up through that gap had made her feel as though she was standing atop a precipice, leaning, leaning out over the abyss.
Months later, when Paul had ranted in delirium about his partner Rudy, about hunger and the taste of human flesh, she thought she could guess what was hidden behind that stack of stones.
Now Charlotte crouched in the dirt by McCoy's corpse and flung stones in a semicircle behind her until she exposed a slot, barely a foot high.
She stuck her candle inside, flopped onto her stomach and strained to see what she could see. Instead of a catacomb, she found a tight passage. The sweet odor she remembered swirled through her nostrils, and this time it was irresistible, like falling in love, like flying. And she realized that it was all meant to be. McCoy's death, far from a tragedy, was the beginning of a new life for her.
Hours later, back in her suite on the fifth floor, Charlotte bathed, tightened her corset until her head spun and put on a new silk dress with black jet beads. Her eyes sparkled in her dressing table mirror. All of her aches and troubles, all the years, fell away.
That night, she took in more gold than ever before. Triumphant, she hauled the sacks down to the vault, unlocked the heavy door. And immediately when she stepped inside the vault, she rushed into the embrace of the cave. She swung the door shut, locked it behind her, threw off her evening dress and stripped to her corset and bloomers.
Then she lay on her back and wriggled into the slot she'd uncovered the night before.
Once she had passed through, she sat upright. She reached back and brought out her candle in its holder. Its light danced over the rough walls of a tunnel just high enough for a person to walk upright. A whole new world, waiting just for her.
She stepped forward cautiously. Rubble pinched her feet in their dainty embroidered slippers. The passage widened, and in a niche to the left was a black hole as wide as a whiskey barrel. She crouched and lowered her candle to take a look.
Below her was a chamber, perhaps the size of the original Long Shot Saloon. How perfect! How fitting!
She went back, took McCoy's collar and tugged him behind her, inch-by-inch, through the slot, pulling on his hair, his suspenders, kicking his knees out of the way with the heel of her slippers. Something went "crack!" and finally he was on the other side. She lined up his feet with the whiskey barrel-sized hole, heaved him up by the armpits and pushed. He thumped to the ground below. Then she collapsed, panting and sweating. And she cried.
Again and again over the following weeks, Charlotte found herself drawn back to that spot. She kneeled next to the whiskey barrel-shaped hole, breathed the sweet air of the cavern deep into her lungs. Shared her problems, her triumphs with McCoy's corpse. He always knew a way that things might turn out differently. She began to see that the present was really very malleable. That right and wrong, true and false, dead and alive didn't really exist.
For her visits to McCoy, she bought a resin-hardened felt hat and a newfangled miner's "teapot" lamp that hooked onto it. A flame shot out of the spout, illuminating her way, leaving her hands free. She dragged an old ladder in, clambered down to be closer to McCoy in his crypt.
When her belly got too big to wriggle through the slot, she often lay in the vault, a sack of gold dust for a pillow, and whispered to McCoy. Her voice echoed away through the cavern. She imagined that he could hear, but it wasn't the same as being right there in his crypt.
More direct access to McCoy was what she needed. She envisioned a hidden door from the third floor, a stone staircase leading down to a spot halfway between the vault and McCoy's crypt. She could blast a new door into the vault. No more crawling around in the dirt. She could stroll from one chamber to another easily. Meeting with McCoy would be much easier, she wouldn't have to lug bags of gold through the kitchen, and she could keep a closer eye on her earnings. No more unfortunate incidents like the one that had led to McCoy's demise. No, she wasn't angry about that. What was done was done.
Immediately after he was born, Cha
rlotte sent McCoy's baby upstairs to the working girls. In a cold sweat, she lurched down to see McCoy. He would be surprised to learn that he had an heir and glad that he hadn't deserted her.
The hotel prospered. Charlotte was both there and not there. People whispered that Charlotte disappeared for hours at a time.
But on the edge of the wilderness, where lives and fortunes were lost in the blink of an eye, where everything was changeable, where the worst could happen at any moment, it paid to be on Charlotte's good side. It almost looked like chance, in a land so volatile, but not quite. Charlotte's enemies suffered. Those who were loyal prospered.
Chapter 6
The years passed quickly in Long Shot until 1868. In the depths of winter, when the gods hurled stinging pellets of ice over the ridge tops and back again, when the river froze and there was no water for sluicing, Luke foolishly started the trek up the canyon from Boulder to Long Shot. His story nearly ended with him slumped in the doorway of the Long Shot Hotel, fingers too frozen to grip the doorknob.
One of Charlotte's bouncers woke him from a warm and peaceful dream, dragged him inside and thawed him out. When word reached Charlotte that the newcomer couldn't speak. Charlotte took an inordinate interest in him. She dubbed him Bonesy because he was so skinny, and as soon as he could limp around on his own, she brought him down to meet McCoy.
Bonesy swallowed his dismay, doffed his brimmed hat and bowed to the corpse. After all, Miss Charlotte had saved his life.
"No one can keep their head in Long Shot, Bonesy. I try to make allowances, but this boggles the mind: my workers have blasted too deep and in the wrong direction, and now my private little tunnel goes nowhere. It ends a foot under this stake here. What's that McCoy? Yes, perhaps it is for the best, but I'm still angry!"
Bonesy tried not to look at the corpse. What did this have to do with Bonesy? He waited.
"The tunnel was supposed to end up above us, near the vault," she said. "But due to the new, surprise layout, I want to move the contents of the vault to this room. That's your job."
She brought him jerky, crackers and beer, a pile of rags to sleep in and a kerosene lantern. Bonesy set to work. His mind travelled far and wide as his body did the job. Most of the time, when his mind returned from its travels, his lantern had burnt out and Bonesy was lying on his side in the rubble. He would argue with himself about the pros and cons of continuing and the pro side would kick him back into motion, like kicking a stone off a hill.
Down the Throat of the Mountain Page 3
