“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. They lived in tepees and huts, and they used to catch fish and trap animals, like rabbits and squirrels. I think that’s icky, eating squirrels, don’t you, Dad?”
He thought of the wonderfully tame creatures that would eat peanuts out of your hand in Central Park. “I sure do,” Brad said.
“But that’s what they did. Honest.”
“Just how’d you find all this out, Apple Guy?”
“That lady told me on the porch. She said Indians lived all around here back when it was just woods, and no white people like us. That was before the Pilgrims, I guess.”
“I bet you’re right.”
“She said there are still some Indians here, only they don’t live in tepees anymore. They live in houses just like we do and have regular jobs and things like that. She said you might not even know they were Indians unless they told you, because they talk the same as us now, too.”
“And how does she know all this?”
“Well, she had a book about Indians. But there weren’t any pictures,” Abbie said, sounding disappointed.
“Did she say what she does when she isn’t reading?” he asked.
“She said she studies Indians. At a brown college.”
Brad had to ponder that before it clicked. “Do you mean Brown University? That’s the name of a college, not a kind of college.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Abbie said, shaking her head in agreement.
“Did she say anything about a degree?”
“A degree?” The lines on Abbie’s face deepened.
“It’s what you get after you’ve graduated. Older people like her often are going for their Ph.D.s.”
“For their what?”
“Their P-H-D. It’s a kind of degree you get after years and years and years of work. Some people are my age or even older before they get them.”
“Wow,” Abbie said with awe. She didn’t exactly think her father was old, but she understood quite well that he was a lot older. “I don’t remember if she said anything about a P-H-D.”
Brad took another hit off his beer. “Can I have a sip?” Abbie asked. “Please?”
“Just one.”
Abbie raised the bottle to her lips, sending one damn fine swig down the old hatch. Brad pulled the bottle away. Abbie patted her stomach in appreciation, then belched softly. Abbie had it down pat, the whole beer-quaffing ritual. Brad secretly liked to think he’d been a good model.
“Say ‘excuse me,’ “ he reminded her.
“Excuse me.”
“And no more,” he said firmly when his daughter reached for it again.
Abbie went to the window and looked out into the night, which had settled completely over them. You couldn’t even see the purple outlines of the hills anymore. The wrought-iron lamppost at the end of the drive was on. A great flurry of moths was congregated around it, their wings fluttering so crazily that she could hear them over the background of crickets. Abbie watched, fascinated. Where they lived in New York, there were occasional mosquitoes (they laid their eggs in Central Park, Brad had told her), and there were plenty of cockroaches—some very large and nasty specimens among them—but moths and butterflies were infrequent visitors. Abbie knew them mostly from books and Sesame Street.
Except for the moth convention, the porch was empty. The woman had gone.
“Did she say what kinds of Indians, Apple Guy?” Brad asked when Abbie had returned. Indians might make a nice feature story for his paper.
“No.”
“No names of tribes?”
“No. But she told me her name. It’s Thomasine.”
“Do you mean Thomasina?” he said, emphasizing the final vowel.
“Oh, no. She said that’s what everyone always thought, that it was Thomasina, but it really wasn’t. She said she was the only one she knew with her name. Do you like that name, Dad?”
“I guess so,” he answered. “It certainly is different. Did she say her last name?”
“Unh-unh. Only her first one.”
Abbie tugged at his beer. Brad gave in, allowing her a small sip.
“Dad?” she said earnestly when her throat was clear.
“Yes, hon?”
“Are you going to have a date with her?”
He wasn’t surprised at the question. She’d asked it, or one very similar, before about women with whom he’d come into contact. He knew that the issue of divorce and the great uncharted territory that followed had been discussed—surprisingly frankly and effectively, he thought—on Mister Rogers. And he knew she was old enough to understand that in most cases both Mommy and Daddy after the divorce eventually got around to going out with Someone New (the kid never had much of a say in who it would be, Mr. Rogers had said; you just had to trust Mommy and Daddy’s judgment). Just like big kids, most divorced mommies and daddies went out on “dates.”
“No, we’re not going out on a date,” Brad said. “I don’t know her, Apple Guy. You have to know someone before you ask her out on a date.”
“Maybe you should know her,” Abbie said. “She’s very pretty. And I think she’s very smart, too. I liked her, Dad.”
“I’m glad you did. But I’m still not going to ask her out on a date. Now I think it’s time for this young lady to go to bed. I want you to brush your teeth and get your PJs on, and then I’ll read you a story.”
“Two stories? Please, Dad?”
“Well . . .” He teased her.
“Pretty please with sugar on it?”
“OK, as long as there’s sugar on it.”
“Goody! I want the dinosaur story and Rainbow Brite.”
“Did you bring them in from the car?”
“Yup.”
“OK, you got it. Two stories. Now go brush your teeth.”
Abbie padded off into the bathroom. Brad listened to the sounds of water being drawn, brushing, rinsing, and gargling. Finally, he heard her voice—so much a little girl’s voice, he thought, like some kind of baby songbird.
“Dad?” she called to him.
“Yes, Apple Guy?”
“Can we leave the light on tonight?”
“Are you scared?”
“No . . .” She hesitated. “Well, it’s a little scary, that’s all.”
“Of course we can,” he said as Abbie padded back to where he was sitting, dinosaur book in hand.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tuesday, August 26
“Motherfuck,” Harry Whipple swore through sixty-eight-year-old toothless gums. “Motherfucking fuck.”
His kerosene lantern had blown out, he’d forgotten the flashlight he’d been reminding himself to carry, and now it was darker than the inside of an asshole. Whipple groped inside his coveralls for his hip flask. He took a swallow of whiskey and belched, leaving an acid taste in his throat.
“Motherfuck,” he repeated. He was cocked to the gills, but that was no front-page news.
Just where the Christ had a gust of wind like that come from, anyway? he wondered. Here, a good quarter of a mile inside this disintegrating old mine? He’d felt it clearly—more substantial than a draft, cold, clammy, raising the hairs on the back of his neck as if someone invisible had lightly touched him there. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt air stirring in this hellhole, but it was the first time it had been strong enough to extinguish a Coleman lantern.
There’d been a noise, too. A low rumbling, coming from underneath and to one side of him, back where he’d been digging three months ago.
“Fuck.”
He dropped the pick he’d been swinging. The metal hit rock, sending up a sharp echo that seemed to pierce his eardrums. The lantern and wooden matches were a good twenty feet away. Twenty feet of rotted timbers, small boulders, rocks, dirt, broken bottles, all the assorted crap that had piled up in two months of backbreaking work in this spot. A man could get seriously hurt trying to find his way through that mess in such total blackness, he thought. A shit-faced man could g
et himself killed.
Somewhere on him he had a book of matches. Or a Bic lighter, he couldn’t remember which. But he remembered he’d been wearing these pants the last time he’d allowed himself the luxury of a cigar, two or three days ago, and he figured whatever the hell he’d used to get the thing going had to be in one of his pockets. The question was which one. With both hands he started exploring. Jesus, these pants had a lot of pockets. He couldn’t recall ever knowing just how many. Pockets in the rear, pockets on the side, pockets on the front, pockets down the leg. Pockets inside pockets. There seemed to be something in each of them, too. Keys. Several varieties of change. A penknife. Matches. Where were the matches?
“Piss,” he swore.
Finally, success. He found matches in the watch pocket, closest pocket to his underwear, which was permanently stained a rusty color from the sweat and piss that got to percolating in there when he was working and drinking at full steam, as he’d been most days all summer. The cover of the book was soggy. Whipple opened it. He struggled to separate a match. Christ, was it stuffy in here, gust of air or no gust of air. More stuffy than usual—and the usual was like a greenhouse with the sun blazing and the vents shut. Maybe that was because he’d been at it since eleven, and it was going on three now. Time to call it a day, once he got his lantern lit.
The first match sputtered and died. So did the second. So did three, four, and five. He was swearing up a storm now, cursing the darkness, dead niggers, his dead sister, the punks on their dirt bikes, the Indians who were supposed to have discovered gold here but refused to tell the white man exactly where.
The sixth match held. He cupped his hand around it and prepared to move toward the lantern.
That’s when he saw it.
Something moving through the shadows.
An animal? Whatever it was, it looked fifteen feet long.
“Fuck,” he swore.
Animal.
No, that couldn’t be. Weren’t no goddamn animals in North America that big, let alone western Massachusetts. You didn’t need Marlon Perkins to tell you that.
“Shit.”
The match sputtered and went cold in his hand, which was shaking badly.
Since May he’d been at work in this abandoned mine.
May, the month his only sister had died, leaving him a house and more than one hundred acres of land a half mile up Thunder Rise from the closest neighbors, the Ellises. She’d been a spinster, Marjorie Whipple had, meticulous and efficient in everything she’d done, and when a cerebral hemorrhage quietly claimed her in her sleep at the age of eighty-one, her affairs had been in order. A lawyer had witnessed her will, and her burial policy was paid up, and her place in the family plot at Morgantown Cemetery was properly reserved. She’d even selected an undertaker—there really was only one to select, Jake Cabot—and expressed to him her wishes regarding her final rites.
Harry’s inheritance wasn’t his because Marjorie had any particular fondness for her younger brother (“an accident,” her dear mother had confided to her before she’d passed on in 1952); in fact, quite the opposite was closer to the truth. While Marjorie had carved out a modest niche for herself as a county court clerk, Harry, in the grand scheme of things, had successfully developed into the classic loser. He’d had a succession of failures as short-order cook, garage monkey, school janitor, painter, woodchopper, and assembly-line worker at the GE plant in Pittsfield. In Marjorie’s eyes, her only sibling was a lazy sot who’d so far come to nothing and now, in the twilight of his drunken existence, certainly never could. But there were no other relatives, and Marjorie had been too frugal to be big on charities, so Harry Whipple had inherited all: the land, the house, the furnishings, a rattletrap Jeep, and a paid-off mortgage.
He was living on his meager Social Security in an apartment over Morgantown Hardware when the assistant at Kelly’s Funeral Home brought word of her death. “That’s too bad, isn’t it?” He said, and those five words were the extent of his grief, public and private. He was, however, somewhat surprised to learn that Marjorie, being of sound mind and body, had named him her heir. But he didn’t ponder that one any too long either. According to his calculations, after sixty-eight years of the bad stuff, it was about time his luck changed for the better. After packing his clothes into a single suitcase, he moved in the afternoon she was planted.
He’d always loved her place, despite having been invited to visit on only three occasions he could recall (the day of their mother’s funeral, the day Marjorie returned from the hospital after an attack of kidney stones, and a Christmas too many years ago to remember). Loved the location. Loved the house, a bungalow with two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and bathroom. And to think it was his now. To think that he’d outlived his stuck-up, holier-than-thou, old-maid sister. How it did his heart good claiming her bed, cooking on her stove, eating off her dishes, taking his daily craps in her once-spotless toilet. Irony wasn’t a concept familiar to him, but if it had been, he would have attached the word “supreme” to it. Here was a place where he could close out his account the way he most desired: by peacefully drinking, unencumbered by constables or Bible-toting sodality ladies out to save his soul. All courtesy of dear departed Sis, a Christian woman who to his certain knowledge had never touched so much as a drop of the stuff.
He hadn’t planned to dig.
In the grand tradition of bachelor lushes, he’d planned to eat frozen dinners and Dinty Moore beef stew and kick his dog, Eddie, when the damn thing was in need of it. With his shotgun he’d planned to keep the punks at bay and shoot the woodchucks getting into his meager garden. Once a year or so he planned to put on his Sunday best and make the trip to Albany, where, in the privacy of a room at the Days Eaze Inn, he would get his dong pleasantly sucked by an aging whore of many years’ acquaintance. He planned to watch the Red Sox games in the summer, the Bruins games in the winter, and he planned to have just enough leftover energy to keep the road plowed with his dead sister’s Jeep. In this way he would ensure himself a steady supply of booze.
But he hadn’t planned to dig.
Hadn’t any intention whatsoever of spending his days inside a crumbling-down shaft some band of pie-eyed dreamers not remarkably different from himself had bored into Thunder Rise over a century ago. In fact, he almost certainly would have followed Marjorie to the grave without the knowledge that it was there, barely a ten-minute walk into the woods, if not for the phone call one morning a week after he’d moved into his new home. But the phone did ring, and Whipple did answer it (it was destined to be the last call before he had the phone disconnected for good), and a very official-sounding man did identify himself as an officer of Pittsfield National Bank. Marjorie Edith Whipple, God rest her soul, had maintained a safe-deposit box with his bank for many years, the officer said. As sole designated heir, whatever is in it is legally yours, Mr. Whipple. If you could clear this matter up at your earliest convenience . . .
That afternoon Whipple drove his Jeep into town. He would have been hard put to say exactly what he was expecting to find. On the one hand, his sister had been one of the all-time penny pinchers, so there was reason to hope she’d squirreled something valuable away—jewels, maybe, or a second life insurance policy. On the other hand, she’d been an awfully queer bird, and so, he reasoned, there was probably a much greater chance she’d used it to store items without any worth to him—family photographs, for instance, or something of Mother’s. Marjorie had always been soft for Mother, the whore.
It seemed the second guess was closer to the mark when he started emptying the box. Birth and baptismal certificates, pictures of young mother with baby daughter (none of middle-age mother with young son), a ring that might be worth a few bucks, a dried corsage (she’d never been married; had she ever been to a formal?).
The map was at the bottom, tucked away inside a yellowed envelope. It was an elaborately drawn document, lettered in an old-fashioned hand with old-fashioned ink, and it was dated 1867. Actually, the
re were two maps on the single piece of parchment. One showed Thunder Rise. It was labeled “Gold???? Give ‘em Hell!!!!” The other was the crude floor plan of a mine that had been bored into the mountain with human and horsepower. Attached to it was a note in Marjorie’s handwriting. It told of discovering the map during a cleanup of one of the basement storerooms at the courthouse where she’d clerked. To clear her conscience, it also told of her attempt to find its owner. Having failed, she’d felt free to take it. Her supervisor had approved, or so the note said.
It did not occur to Whipple then, and it would not once occur to him in the thirty-three days he now had left to live, that the map might have been his sister’s idea of a joke. Not the document—that looked authentic, and had an expert examined it, he would have concluded that it was indeed well over a hundred years old. No, the joke wouldn’t have been the map itself but rather the idea of leaving it where it would surely be discovered by her useless brother, Harry Whipple, one of the great dreamers himself before booze had taken over. A dreamer who just might be tempted into dreaming again after seeing that word that has so teased and tormented mankind over the centuries: gold.
Whipple knew, and Marjorie knew he knew, of the Indian legends. In the whole county you would have been hard pressed to find a native who hadn’t heard one or another of the tales about gold being buried inside Thunder Rise. If you had gone to the Berkshire Historical Society and nosed around in the card catalog under “GOLD, MORGANTOWN,” you would have found a dozen articles chronicling a dozen failed attempts over the centuries to see if there was anything behind that old Indian legend. You would have come across the only verified strike, by an independent prospector into a lode that had yielded several pounds of the precious stuff before running dry in 1861. That modest strike, never duplicated, had touched off a rush culminating in the formation of the Berkshire Minerals Company, that firm of pie-eyed dreamers that had bored a half mile into the mountain before going belly up in June 1868.
For three months Whipple had been digging. Sixty-eight frigging years old, looking at least ten older, and what had he come down with but a case of gold fever—and a bad case at that. After seeing the map, after pondering it a few days, after recalling the legends, he’d been unable to shake it. Not that he had grandiose plans for what he’d do with his newfound riches, should he beat the odds and happen on the mother lode that was rumored to be in there. He didn’t have a place in Florida in mind, or his own private jet, or a million-dollar yacht. Maybe he’d buy his favorite whore a brand-new Cadillac and go riding with her down Main Street, hooting and hollering at the assholes. Maybe he’d just hoard the stuff, fill his cellar with it, his chest of drawers, his linen closet, bathe with it, eat it for dinner, shit it away down his virgin sister’s toilet.
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