Sobbing, I raise my face and pull in deep gulps of dust-choked air. I use my hands to lever my hips and legs out of the tiny access tunnel and tumble onto the ground, blind with relief.
For a few moments I lie there on the cold ground, heaving in grainy breaths, waiting for the tide of fear I was drowning in to pull away from me. I am super aware of my body; my face against the smooth floor of an established mine tunnel; every scratch and rip along my aching fingers; the abrasions on my hips; the heaviness of my sneakered feet. I know it must have only been minutes that I was in the crawlway, but it felt like an eternity.
I notice the darkness and reach a trembling hand up to my head. My helmet is still there. I trace the line down from the headlamp and find a dangling tube. In my panic, I must have sheared off my acetylene tank.
This is very bad. I feel around at my feet, but I don’t brush against any smooth metal cylinders. I consider striking the lighter in my pocket so I can see. But then I picture my little tank somewhere halfway between myself and freedom. I try to remember whether acetylene is a gas that floats up or seeps down, but I can’t. I decide not to chance a flame. I’m still trembling with my last near-death encounter.
“Ana? Ana! Are you okay?” Victor’s voice echoes down the access shaft.
I turn my head in slow arcs, trying to orient myself to the sound. There! A moon-shaped grayness in the unending black marks the opening. I put out a hand to steady myself.
“Victor.” A coughing spasm racks me when I try to speak. “I’m through!”
“Thank God. I was so worried when you screamed.”
I have nothing to say to that.
“Did you find Guillermo?” he asks.
In my mind-crushing panic I had forgotten.
“Guillermo?” I grope around in the dark.
“Here!” says a choked voice beside me.
“Guillermo?” When I reach to my left, my hand brushes a shirt. I sweep my hands over him. “Are you hurt?”
“I . . .”—his voice is clogged with tears and blast dust—“can’t feel my legs.”
My fingers have to do my seeing for me. My hands trace up his shoulder and find his face. I check his head—no wetness, that’s good, at least his skull isn’t cracked. He’s bowed awkwardly off the floor. I fumble in the darkness until I can pull the loose rocks out from under him and he can rest flat. I trail my hands down his arms and across his chest, pushing away the debris piled on him, then down the side of his leg. I’ve only made it to his knee when my fingers meet the wall of rubble.
My hands flit over to his other knee; same problem there. I grip the fabric of his jeans and give a small tug, just to see if, by some miracle, his legs will slide free. When I do this, Guillermo gasps in agony.
His legs don’t move.
He’s trapped.
The pain of me pulling on his legs has fully woken him up, and I can hear his rapid breathing beside me.
“Shh,” I say.
“I . . . I . . .” His gulping breaths don’t let him finish.
“No, no, don’t panic,” I say, panicking. “We’re going to get you out.”
I flutter my hands along the grade of the slope. It doesn’t feel good. To test my theory, I pull a few rocks off the top. As soon as I do, a top layer sluices down.
Guillermo hollers in fear and I throw my body over his head and shoulders. Rocks bounce off my back. When the noise of the rockslide stops, I carefully lift myself off his chest and move my hands over the slope again. The angle is gentler, but now he’s covered from the waist down.
“Help!” he yells at me.
There’s nothing I can do or say to make it better. If I keep pulling at the rocks, the physics of the thing in front of me means I’m likely to bury him completely.
“We need to wait for the miners to help us,” I tell him. “They’ll know how to get you out.”
I hear a commotion above us. The sweep of a flashlight beam lights the access tunnel. The low rumble of male voices and the echo of boots was a sound that frightened me the last time I was in these tunnels, but I am beyond glad to hear them now.
“Victor?” I call. “What’s going on?”
“Ana!” He sounds relieved. “Some people are here. Hang on! Was that Guillermo? Are you guys okay?”
“I’m all right.” I pause and think about how to say what I need to say next without causing Guillermo to panic. “I found him,” I say. “His legs are stuck. I don’t know how badly hurt they are, but I can’t move the rocks myself. Who’s here? Can they help?”
There’s a rustle at the opening. Then a hoarse voice calls down.
“Ana?”
“César?” I’m stunned. With how sick he’s been, I would never have expected him to come to investigate the blast.
A gale of coughing answers me, and my relief at hearing his voice is instantly washed away by worry and guilt. This is my fault! If I hadn’t decided it was a good idea to toss dynamite around like it was confetti, he would still be in bed, resting.
I hear César’s voice angle away from me. “Okay, men, let’s get to work. Enlarge this access tunnel . . .” His voice gets louder again. “Ana, what direction are you?”
“Left . . . my left. To your right.”
“Enlarge it away from them,” César goes on to his crew.
“Wait!” I call up. “How’s Belén?”
There’s a long pause.
“Victor is taking her home,” he says. “They’ll take care of her. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
He doesn’t sound convinced. My heart twists in my chest. “César?”
“Yes?”
There are so many things I want to say. I want to apologize for being part of what got Belén hurt; apologize for dragging him out in the night wind with his cough. I want to beg him to forgive me for being such a bad daughter so far, and to admit that I think, maybe, I’m happy to be a part of his family.
“I lost my acetylene tank in the tunnel. It might be leaking. Tell the men to be careful as they dig.”
“Okay,” he says. “We’re coming, Ana. Hold tight.”
* * *
I rest my forehead against the rough stone of the rubble wall blocking our exit. Lifting my shirt over my nose and mouth, I try to breathe as deeply as I can through the fabric, listening to the slow, clanking, scraping process of the men enlarging the access tunnel. The dust has sifted somewhat out of the air, but it’s still murky and difficult to breathe. I can only imagine how hard it must be for Guillermo, his body seizing up in pain, half a tunnel weighing him down, trapped and having to wait.
The lights from the miners’ helmets bob and flash erratically down the access tunnel. Some moments I can see Guillermo, his narrow face pinched and panicked; other moments I can only hear the labored sound of his breathing in the dark.
“Do your legs hurt very badly?” It’s probably not the best thing to say, but it’s all I can think of.
“Not as badly as when you pulled on them, or when the rocks shifted, but it’s not good,” he admits through gritted teeth. “How long do you think it will take for them to dig us out?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. A while. But they’ll get in here as soon as they can. César’s out there. He’ll make sure they get you out safely.”
In the strobe of light, I see the worried look on his face and realize that being dug out by his old supervisor might not be a comforting thought to Guillermo right now.
“What happened?” he asks finally. “All I remember is getting to the mouth of the mine and then I was flying backward. I woke up in the dark, with my legs buried.”
I chew the inside of my lip. Guillermo and his papi always thought I never belonged in the mine. I’m not sure he’s recognized me yet. If I admit who I am, will he be angry? Then again, I think wryly, what can he do to me with half a mountain holding
him down?
“It was the dynamite that I threw,” I admit. “It collapsed the entryway where you were hiding.”
“You threw dynamite at me?”
“Not at you . . . just, well, away from myself . . . which happened to be toward you, but I never meant it to hurt you . . . or anyone . . . I just . . . It’s a long story,” I mumble.
Guillermo gives a bitter laugh. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And he’s right about that, so I scoot closer to him and tell him the whole story of taking the job as guarda, Belén joining me, and the mess with the dynamite when he and his father showed up. I hesitate to tell him that Francisco left him here instead of helping to dig him out, but to my surprise, Guillermo doesn’t seem shocked by this.
“That was always the plan, if we got separated,” he says. “He’ll come back for me.”
I stare at Guillermo, wondering if he hit his head harder than we thought. “He left,” I repeat. “He saw that you’d been buried in the mine and he left you here. He didn’t even know if you were okay or dead!”
Guillermo snorts dismissively. “Papi would have trusted me to get out of the way. He knows I know my way around the mine.”
I can’t believe he’s defending this behavior, and it makes me snappish.
“Oh yeah? And how did that work out for you? Do you know your way out from under that pile of rock holding down your lower half?”
There’s a long, sullen silence. I regret my nastiness.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t look where I was throwing it at all. I just knew I had to get it away from myself and my sister. Even if you were trying to rob the mine, no one deserves what you’re suffering.”
“We weren’t robbing the mine,” Guillermo says.
“What?”
For a moment, guilt paralyzes me. What if they were just walking by, minding their own business, and I attacked them? What if this is all my fault and they didn’t do anything wrong?
Then I remember how the two of them were sneaking over the hill, not walking on the road, and I remember the bag Francisco took with him when he ran, and I remember Guillermo saying just a moment ago that splitting up was part of some plan. They were up to something.
“We weren’t,” he insists. “We were just doing extra, after-hours mining.”
“After hours . . .” I trail off, remembering the voices deep in the mountain that shouldn’t have been there the night I came down here looking for Daniel. “How long have you been doing this?” I ask suspiciously.
Guillermo shrugs. “Better part of a month,” he says. I see him clenching and unclenching his hands by his sides like he can’t make up his mind whether to keep talking or not. But talking must be taking his mind off his legs because, finally, he relaxes them and goes on. “We were working off by ourselves one day—César had left us to go deal with some problem or other—and we came across a vein of silver.”
“Silver? No way.” Everyone knows the silver in this mountain is all gone. There are only tiny filaments of it left in some of the rocks.
“Not a big vein,” Guillermo corrects me as if I’m an idiot, “not much thicker than a pencil. But it was good quality, pretty pure.”
“And?” I prompt. A pencil-width of silver is not nothing.
“And Papi said maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone about it,” he goes on, his voice dropping to a mumble. “That it was only a thin thread, and if we gave it to the cooperative, it would have to be shared among all the miners—not even just the ones on our crew, but everyone. He said there might only be a thimbleful of silver, and to divide it out among so many would mean we’d only get centavos.”
“So you kept it to yourselves,” I say, my voice hard. I feel bile churn in my stomach. Francisco and Guillermo are thieves—worse than thieves, because they decided to rob their coworkers, their neighbors, people they knew were poor, not those who could afford to lose things. “You work in a cooperative. Profits are supposed to be shared. Tell me again how that’s not stealing?”
“If we had shared it, there wouldn’t have been any profit!” he barks at me, and I can hear the echo of his father in his voice. “We had to keep it to ourselves until we knew what we really had. Then we would—Papi said then, if it was a lot, of course we’d share it.”
I can hear the desperation in his voice to believe that. It’s the same tone he had when he said his father would come back for him. I want to tell him he’s an idiot to believe anything Francisco said, but we all want to think the best of our fathers, when we can. It’s not like my papi was perfect. I keep my mouth shut.
“We covered it up and told César the air was bad and that we needed to move somewhere else,” Guillermo goes on. “Then we came back at night and worked, just the two of us, and collected what we could.” He pauses. “But then the thread went deeper than we could reach with our picks, and Papi said we should use some dynamite—just a little, he said. Not so much they’d hear it topside. Just enough to loosen the outer layer . . .” he trails off.
“But you used too much,” I say, remembering the zone seven tunnel caving in around me, the puff of air and dust that doused my light.
“I guess.” He shrugs. “It became unstable. Part of the lower tunnel collapsed and we had to run. We made it to the top just seconds before César and the others arrived. We pretended we’d come because of the noise too, and joined the cleanup crew. Then they found your brother and the place was swarming. We couldn’t go back. Papi said we should take the opportunity to get the metal processed. So we told everyone we had to leave town for a funeral, and we went to Uyuni and paid a man to use the smelter there and extract the silver. We couldn’t do it here. It would have raised too many questions. Everyone knows us here.”
“But you came back.”
“The ore was good quality. Not much, but real pure. Papi wanted to check one last time and see if there was any we had missed, so we came tonight. We didn’t know they had hired a new guarda.”
“Well, they did. But it doesn’t matter,” I say bitterly. “You got your silver, and you even got out of cleaning up the mess you made getting it. Your stunt nearly killed me—it nearly killed Daniel.”
“Whatever,” he snaps. “You’ve made an even bigger mess.”
“So—what? We’re even?” I snort. “Your explosion buried me, my explosion buried you, and that’s that?”
“Hey, if we hadn’t set that, they never would have found your brother. You have me to thank that he’s a cripple, not a corpse. Besides, you should never have been in the mine anyway. It’s probably because you were there that night that our blast went wrong.”
I remember why I dislike Guillermo and his father so much.
“Fine,” I say, hefting to my feet and turning toward the access tunnel. “I’ll leave.”
“No!” He reaches out and grabs my ankle, surprisingly strong.
I look over my shoulder at him. “I’m bad luck, right? Won’t you be better off if I leave?”
Guillermo’s face crumples. His fingers tremble against my ankle. “Please,” he whispers. “Please don’t leave me here alone.”
And I want to hold on to my anger against him. He and his father have been nothing but unpleasant to me and my family. He deserves the consequences of his actions. But then I think of Daniel, how he was hurt and alone in the dark and how much I wish there had been someone to sit with him while he waited for rescue. Even if it were someone who didn’t like him.
Guillermo is unpleasant and rude, but we’re both just kids trying to survive the Mountain That Eats Men. I sigh. Irony is a sharp, vicious thing. Guillermo constantly harassed me, trying to get me to leave the mine. Now he’s terrified I’ll do exactly that.
I sink back down beside him. “It’s not good to be alone,” I say.
“You’ll stay with me?” he presses, his fingers still latched on the cuf
f of my sweatpants. “Promise?”
“I won’t leave you.” The words taste of ash and rock dust. “I promise.”
Guillermo lets go of my ankle and stares at the tunnel ceiling, his eyes losing focus and his breath hitching in pain.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Not good,” he says. “Cold. Hurt. Scared.”
It’s an honest response. “I’m so sorry I hurt you,” I say again.
“I was here to steal,” he says quietly. “You were here to guard. It’s as much my fault as yours that I’m buried here.”
I nod, accepting that. Glad that what he offered was to take part of the blame rather than offer forgiveness. Guillermo will never be my favorite person in the world, but he’s honest and I can respect that. Here, trapped under a mountain together, it feels like maybe we don’t have to be enemies. Maybe we can just be two people trying to stay alive who have chosen different roads to get there.
I reach out and take his chilled fingers in mine, offering what quiet comfort I can.
And so we sit there, cold and scared together, and wait for César to save us both.
* * *
It’s over an hour later when they manage to dig through to us. By the time the first miner climbs out of the expanded access tunnel, Guillermo has started to tremble violently. In the light from the man’s electric headlamp I can see that his lips have turned purple.
“I think he’s in shock,” I whisper to the man.
Three other men climb in behind him. When I see César straighten up, I can’t help it, I throw myself at him. He wheezes at the impact, but wraps me in a gentle hug.
“It will be all right, mi hija,” he says gently. With my cheek pressed against his chest I can hear the rattle of his breathing, but I don’t call him on his lie. Instead I step away and point toward Guillermo.
César looks where I point. His eyes widen. “Is that . . . ?”
I nod.
César’s expression tightens into a frown. I hear the grumbling behind him from the rest of his team. They all recognize Guillermo.
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