Cold Heart

by Chandler McGrew

  Micky had spent a day with Damon and Marty and Stan the past summer. Marty tried to teach her the intricacies of placer mining. He looked like a Tolkien dwarf, with his tangled beard and bushy gray brows. His shoulders were broad from years of hard work. Stan always said that Marty should smoke a long thin pipe, like Gandalf. But Marty was strong as a horse.

  “You shovel it up and you dump it in,” Marty had said, doing just that. “Why don't you show the lady?” He gave Stan a look that said maybe Stan could do more with his shovel than lean on it.

  Stan stalked off toward the other sluice box.

  The gravel skittered down the washboard bottom of the sluice. The heaviest rocks and debris dropped between the ridges.

  “Gold is heavier than anything,” Marty told her, picking out the larger pebbles and tossing them aside. She leaned over to see. Bright specks of gold gleamed through the icy water.

  Damon was across the stream, fiddling with a hose on Marty's old diesel-powered pump.

  “What's he doing?” she'd asked Marty.

  “We use that to wash the gravel downs off the slopes and into that sluice box over there.” Marty pointed to a spot along the stream below Damon. “But the damn pump breaks down all the time. Not worth the effort.”

  “Damon will get it running.”

  Marty laughed, running a hand across his bald scalp. “He would. But he don't put in the time up here he used to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Damon's getting the bug.”

  “The bug?”

  “Starting to look for The Mine.”

  “Not Aaron's mine?”

  “The same.”

  “Damon told me it was a myth.”

  “He don't believe that anymore. He thinks it's real.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “You know Damon.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she muttered.

  “He'll get over it,” said Marty.

  “You haven't known him long enough.”

  “Maybe you're right,” agreed Marty, grinning.

  Suddenly a loud cursing rattled out from beneath Stan's sluice. Micky and Marty rushed over and leaned under the support braces to give Stan a hand. He'd slipped on the loose gravel and slid down the slope and managed to snap the shovel handle at the same time. Marty shook his head as Stan dusted himself off.

  “Damn shovels are made in Taiwan,” muttered Stan.

  “I never seen anyone break more tools than you,” said Marty, spitting.

  “I think I got another one in my shed,” said Stan.

  “Like hell you do. You're just going to go sit on your ass.”

  “You got no call to talk to me like that.”

  “Stan, you're the laziest bastard I know,” said Marty, winking at Micky, who had begun to get a little nervous. “You stay here and try to make yourself useful if that's possible. I have another shovel in the cache down by the Fork.”

  Marty hiked off downtrail and Stan made a ceremony of filling his pipe. When he finally got it lit great puffs of smoke billowed around him.

  “You like it here?” asked Stan.

  “Yes,” said Micky.

  Stan chewed the pipe and nodded knowingly. “Nice place to ruminate.”

  “Ruminate?”

  “That means to cogitate. Or muse.”

  “I knew that,” said Micky.

  “Nice place to do it.”

  “I suppose it is.” Unlike Marty, who was a what you see is what you get type, Stan bewildered her. Was he trying to impress her with his vocabulary? Or was he serious?

  “Sometimes I can stand for hours and stare at the mountains,” he said.

  “They're pretty.”

  “Drives Marty crazy.”

  “I guess it would.”

  “That's part of the beauty,” said Stan.

  Damon had laid the hose parts down between his thighs and was staring up into the mountains himself. He had his hands on his hips. Silhouetted by the sun, he looked like a bronze statue.

  “Damon told me that hard-rock mining wasn't worth a person's time,” she said.

  Stan picked up Marty's shovel and tossed a half spadeful of gravel into the sluice. “It ain't, mostly. Not unless you're a big company. Takes a lot of heavy equipment.”

  “Then why waste your time looking for a gold mine?”

  “Well, if you find the mother lode, it's worth a fortune. I've seen a slice of gold as thick as your little finger wedged between two pieces of quartz. A man finds a vein like that, the equipment cost don't really matter. But it isn't the gold.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People like Damon. And Aaron. When they get it into their head to find that vein, it isn't the money. It's the finding.”

  Micky stared at Damon's back, his body set against the mountains, every bit as unyielding. And she knew exactly what Stan meant.

  “Jesus,” she muttered again.

  She smiled, remembering Stan's pleasure when he'd pulled a dime-sized nugget out of Marty's sluice. He wouldn't admit it.

  But it was the finding with him and Marty too.

  She hiked on. Away from the sound of the gun.

  12:15

  COME ON, DAWN, SAID EL.

  He was standing on Terry's clean laundry. Blood splotched his shirt and his pants and there was enough on his boots that he left partial red footprints on the damp sheets.

  “You can't run through the bushes. There's nowhere to go.”

  He strode across the laundry, kicking it away as a towel stuck to his foot. He stood in the center of the path, staring down into the alders on both sides of the stream. There was just enough of an opening in the trees there to allow Terry and Dawn to gather water.

  Dawn had raced straightaway from the cabin door and instinctively dived into the thick foliage. Now she peeked out at El, not daring to move or breathe. Her thoughts raced. The rough gravel bit into her knees and elbows.

  “There's nowhere for you to go!” he repeated, nodding to his right. “That way's my house.” He looked down the other direction, around the cabin and across the bridge. “And that way you have to go through me. You can't get away, Dawn.”

  He calmly flipped open the side port of the single-action pistol and ejected two spent shells, replacing them with cartridges in his bulging pants pocket.

  Dawn crouched farther down the slope, trembling like a leaf. She couldn't get the horrible images—Terry's frail body quivering on the floor as El stabbed her, the empty darkness of the big pistol barrel pointing in her own face—out of her brain.

  But El had slipped in her mother's blood and his shots had gone wild. Even in death, her mother was looking out for her. In the end she had saved her daughter from one of the very creatures that inhabited her worst nightmares.

  “You all have to die,” said El. “You can't stay here anymore.”

  The most terrifying thing to Dawn was the casual way in which he said it. Like he was saying “We have to get ready in case it rains.”

  What's wrong with him?

  And what does he mean by all?

  Was he talking about her and her mother?

  He took a step closer to the slope and she could no longer see his face. But now she could see the pistol again, hanging beside his bloody pants leg. That and one boot.

  She held her breath and tried to stop shaking.

  He was whispering now, as though he knew exactly where she was. How close he stood to her.

  “You can't live. You have to understand that, Dawn. Your mother knew. She turned her back for me so it wouldn't hurt. I don't want to hurt you either. But you can't stay here.”

  She wanted to scream at him to go away and leave them alone. But the instant he heard her he'd shoot her dead. Her only hope was that he didn't really know where she was.

  The trouble was that she couldn't hold her breath any longer. It all wanted to come out in a gigantic burst. There was sweat on her hands, on her face, trickling down into her eyes and the back of her neck.
She exhaled so slowly that it was just a silent hiss of air across her lips and a fierce stinging in her lungs.

  She breathed back in the same way. But it wasn't fast enough or powerful enough to fulfill her body's need for oxygen. She did it over and over, the ache intensifying, praying that El would give up and go away.

  When he leaped forward and crashed through the branches, she nearly screamed. He stumbled around, grunting and stamping like a wounded grizzly. The alders jerked and slapped her face. She was tangled in them like a fly in a web.

  “Come out of there!” shouted El.

  She could see both his boots now, inches away from her, and a razor of fear sliced up her spine.

  He was standing on the handkerchief.

  She'd still had it in her hand as she scrambled over the side of the bank, down to the Fork, and she must have dropped it as she dived into the alders. Until El stepped on it, the scrap of cloth had been forgotten. Now it seemed to point to her hiding place like a neon sign.

  Had El noticed it yet?

  Dawn glanced slowly around to see if there was any escape. But she knew there was none. El would never miss at this range.

  She was screwed.

  But his big black boot covered all but the corner of the handkerchief. If he didn't look directly down at it, he might not notice…

  “Come on out, you little bitch,” said El. He kicked at the brush. But there was no anger in his movements. His voice never rose, although he had been shouting before. He sounded almost as though he was bored. As though he was talking to himself.

  Curling up tightly, she held her breath until she knew her lungs would burst.

  12:20

  MICKY WAS A THIRD of the way to Cabels’ Store, her mind on the letter she had just completed to Jim, explaining once more that yes, she was fine but no, she had no intention of leaving McRay. And no, there was nothing between her and Damon. They were just friends. Jim had hoped for more out of their relationship, but he'd have to live with that. She and Damon had never been destined to be anything but friends. Damon didn't need a woman the way some men did. Damon needed a direction. A focus. Something he could lock on to the way he had once locked on to his practice.

  A pair of squirrels chittered overhead, playing hide-andseek with her along the trail and she thought of Aaron McRay. The old man was feisty and bright-eyed as one of those small animals. Micky never knew when Aaron was kidding or how he could say some of the wild things that he did.

  His dark eyes would flicker as he spit out some crude remark. Testing or teasing.

  Micky had been in town only three weeks—two longer than she'd intended—when Aaron had pounded on her door.

  “Buy the place or get out,” he'd said.

  “Excuse me?” She didn't know whether to invite the old man in out of the cold or slam the door in his face.

  “My cabin,” he said, nodding at the wall, not her.

  “You're Aaron McRay.”

  “No shit.”

  “I was invited here,” she told him. “I thought you knew. I'm sorry.”

  “Did know. You want it or what?”

  “Want what? The cabin? I'm only visiting.”

  “Don't give me that crap.” He spit tobacco juice onto the snow beside the stoop. A brown trickle ran through the whiskers on his chin. “You aren't going anywhere.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “They never do.”

  “They?”

  “The assholes that move into McRay.”

  She couldn't help herself. She laughed in his face.

  His scowl cracked a little. “Think that's funny?”

  “I have an odd sense of humor.”

  “Good. You want the fucking place, or what?”

  “I said I'm just visiting.” Had Damon mentioned the old man was a little insane? She didn't remember.

  “You crazy?”

  Was he reading her mind? “Excuse me?”

  “Heard you might be crazy.”

  Micky burst out laughing. “Just mildly psychotic.”

  “Cy what?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I'm crazy.”

  “Good. Women don't belong in the bush, though.” But his scowl definitely cracked.

  “Really.”

  “It's a fact.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says me.”

  He turned to leave.

  “Like some coffee?” she asked impulsively.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. “Any good?”

  “No.”

  “Sure.” He pushed past her and took a seat at the table.

  She couldn't help laughing at the absurd conversation.

  After that she had decided that laughter was the key to Aaron.

  He'd say something outlandish.

  She'd laugh.

  She'd laugh again.

  He'd glare and say something more crude or politically incorrect.

  He smiled. No teeth. Just a thin-lipped sneer.

  But she'd also discovered that Aaron could be incredibly thoughtful.

  That same winter, when Damon was off somewhere with Marty and Stan, Micky glanced out of her bedroom window one morning and saw snow halfway up the side of her outhouse. Her woodpile—purchased from Clive, who sold wood as one of his seemingly inexhaustible line of services—was covered in deep powder and a waist-high drift nearly blocked her front door.

  The firewood was twenty feet away. She hadn't stacked it against the building yet and, with a sinking heart, she realized it would take her all day just to dig it out.

  She was bundling up to do so when she heard the scrunch of a shovel out front. She glanced out of the loft window to see the back of Aaron's bright blue parka. He was digging out her woodpile. She zipped up her jacket and bulled her way through the drift, grabbed a shovel, and joined him.

  She said hello.

  He nodded.

  Two hours of silent work later, they both leaned huffing over their shovels.

  “You didn't have to do that.” she said. It was early afternoon but already the sun was long gone and green-and-yellow tendrils of Aurora Borealis ribboned over the peaks.

  “Gonna have fun getting your wood free, now,” said the old man, nodding toward the pile that was frozen together with thick ice. “Cheechako thing to do.” Cheechako was what all the old-timers called greenhorns.

  “I should have stacked it under the eave,” she agreed.

  “Too fucking late now.”

  “Never too late,” she laughed, watching him stomp off back up the trail to his cabin. “Thank you!”

  Aaron lifted one gauntleted hand over his shoulder but didn't look back.

  “I'll take it!” she shouted without thinking.

  “Take what?” He kept walking.

  “The cabin.”

  He turned.

  “You never asked my price.”

  “I don't care,” she said, thinking of the money from both her parents’ and Wade's insurance policies, gathering dust in some dark bank vault.

  “Take it,” said Aaron, with a thin-lipped smile. “I give it to you.”

  Micky stood in the snow, shaking her head.

  A month later the deed had arrived in her mail.

  In a slash of blue, one of the jays whipped down through the trees and chattered at her and she thought how like a jay Aaron was. All chatter and no bite.

  Another gunshot rang through the still air.

  Just across the creek. Maybe it wasn't Marty or Stan. Maybe El had spotted a bear. They did come out this time of year and rummage around the cabins sometimes. Clive had told her to bang a spoon on a pot to frighten them away— noise bothered the big animals—but most people trusted gunfire better.

  But the grizzlies weren't usually aggressive. Not unless you got between a sow and her cub.

  Micky wondered idly if she should go back and get the Glock just for its noise value. But she was already halfway to the store. She began to whistle and snap her fingers as she walked, a
nything to let a wandering bear know that she was coming. Next to running from one of the giant beasts, the worst thing you could do was startle one.

  The trail was narrow and twisting, strewn with boulders and still dotted here and there with tufts of crusty snow. Hares usually shot out of the woods as she traversed the path, but today they were strangely shy. She spotted only one, peeping around a grandfather spruce, off to her left, but he swiftly vanished.

  “Nervous, old bunny?” she said. “You know I wouldn't hurt a fly.”

  Maybe the gunshots had the rabbits on edge. Howard MacArthur and most of the other men in the community hunted the big snowshoes for meat but no one hunted this close to her cabin. Still, the animals were savvy enough to know what the sound of gunfire meant to their species.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, speaking to the empty forest. A sudden burst of anxiety thickened the very air around her. She stared at the spot where the hare was hiding.

  She knew exactly what it felt.

  She could sense it quivering, feel its fear.

  To the rabbit, the gunshot would be echoing like cannon fire, the ground beneath its soft pads vibrating with the terror of the explosion. Its tiny nose would be sniffing the air for the intruder, its ears twitching, eyes shifting desperately left and right, every shadow in the forest a portent of impending pain and death.

  And suddenly she felt an intense hatred for the hunters.

  It was an irrational and emotional response that she should be able to reason away with a good walk on this beautiful day. But the shots touched a bad place in her heart, and just as irrationally she felt the fear not dissipating but growing. She had the crazy thought that it wasn't the hare that was in danger.

  It was her.

  Her heart pounded and her breath quickened. Her palms were damp and her mouth was dry.

  She glanced back down the trail behind her, then hurried on.

  12:25

  EL SPUN AND FIRED while he was still in mid-sentence, still coaxing Dawn to come out of hiding and give herself up. Now he had his back to her, searching the brush.

  When he fired, she'd ducked instinctively. His sudden movement had disturbed the snarl of branches and now all he had to do was turn around and they would be face-toface.