Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  "I'm gone tell them this is your birthday," T.J. said, and it seemed he was accentuating his dialect — subtly thumbing his nose at the opulence. "Get all the servers to gather 'round clappin', singin' Happy Birthday To You."

  "And then give you miniature cake with a sparkler," Brice added.

  "Oh, they know it's her birthday," Dobbs said with an enigmatic smile that made Bailey's stomach clutch. He'd made the reservations, would be paying the tab, and heaven only knew what he'd set up.

  Her signature WPPP — Witness Protection Program paranoia — reared its head for the first time in a long while. When she'd first been tossed with a new name into an anonymous pond, she'd imagined every third fish that swam by was a shark, spent a month looking over her shoulder, fearing to see the specter of a man in a fedora, with a gray beard and an eye patch sneaking up behind her. She gradually accepted the truth of the words the marshal used to sooth her: "Relax. Nobody goes looking for somebody they think is dead."

  But he nevertheless cautioned against notoriety, against becoming the center of attention with all eyes on her. It was not likely, but it was possible that somebody from her own past would spot her — college friend or a former neighbor. That would be disastrous.

  "Dobbs, please, please tell me you haven't arranged some spectacular show, with a full orchestra and a cast of thousands performing for my personal enjoyment right here in the restaurant. Please—"

  He held up his hands in protest.

  "A group picture and a birthday cake — with candles, so you can make a wish."

  She thought of Aaron, who'd wished on the candles of Bethany's first birthday cake to be the official candle-blower-outer at her every birthday celebration. Six months later, he was dead.

  Leave it in the sack.

  She was going to need a bigger sack.

  "No banners or fireworks." Brice smiled. "They don't cater to special occasions."

  No Easter bunnies or Santas here.

  Or Halloween spooks.

  This year, you won't need a mask to go trick-or-treating.

  She shivered, though there was no cool breeze. Tomorrow was Halloween.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bailey had two glasses of "their finest wine," which likely cost more than the gross national product of some Third World countries, and it granted her a pleasant buzz. No sharp edges on anything; the world was painted in a soft, golden glow.

  She smiled prettily when the photographer gathered the others around her for a group photo, then listened to the men engage in an unspoken game of can-you-top-this? with stories about coal mining. T.J. had spent "the most instructive year of my life" between the army and college working in the mines. Dobbs had "gone down" every summer after high school "until I made enough money to buy the dad-gum mine."

  With Dobbs and T.J. seated across from each other, it was like watching a tennis match.

  "The famous Oliver Northfield was just a red-hat miner when I first—" Dobbs began.

  Bailey held up her hand. "Red hat?" She looked from Dobbs to T.J. "Translate."

  "Miners with less than six months' experience have to wear red helmets so the other miners—"

  "Can run when they see 'em comin'," T.J. finished for him.

  "This is my story and I'll thank you to stop shanghaiing it." Dobbs cleared his throat like an orator. "Oliver Northfield made his first million—"

  "In a dog-hole mine—"

  "Dog hole?" Bailey asked. "Is there like a Coal Mining for Dummies I could download so—"

  "A dog-hole mine's no better'n a hole dug by a dog," T.J. said. "Run on a shoestring, cuttin' corners. The methane meters in dog-hole mines ain't no more reliable than an alimony check. I never seen a single meter wasn't stuck in the red zone."

  "Methane … hold on while I look that up in my Dummies book."

  "Methane gas is released when you dig into coal and it's extremely volatile," Dobbs said, wrenching the narrative back to his side of the table. "You can't smell it—"

  "That's what mine canaries are for," Brice stage-whispered. "And methane meters."

  "You never even know it's there until—" Dobbs began.

  "—a spark from a light—"

  "The lights are spark-less sodium—"

  "A spark from something blows pieces of you all over three states," T.J. finished for him. He picked up the surely-it-wasn't-real-silver butter knife and stabbed it into the pale yellow dollop on a crystal dish in the center of the table. "But that mine'd a'been a death trap even if it'd been run right. You know there had to be old works—"

  "Ding, ding, ding!" Bailey said. "Old works?"

  "Miners started digging coal in West Virginia two hundred years ago," Brice said, as T.J. smeared butter on a still-warm dinner roll. "The mountains are riddled with mines so old nobody remembers them, hundreds of unmapped shafts you could accidentally dig into."

  "And that'd be a bad thing because …?"

  "An empty mine shaft don't stay empty, fills up with stuff and ain't none of it good." T.J. took a bite of the roll. "Explosive gases or ones that ain't explosive but just as deadly."

  "Like carbon dioxide," Dobbs said. "And don't talk while you're chewing."

  "CO2 ain't poisonous but it ain't oxygen neither and you can't breathe it. You just collapse, flop 'round like a fish on the shore, gaspin'."

  Bailey shivered at the image

  "Old Works can fill up with water, too," Dobbs said.

  "And that water don't trickle all gentle like a leaky faucet into the shaft," T.J. said, swallowed the bite of dinner roll and washed it down. "Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water …" He gestured with his water glass. "You stick a hole in the bottom of it and whoosh!"

  "I'm having trouble picturing this," Bailey said. "Miners get on this mantrip train thingy," she glanced at Brice and he nodded his approval that she'd remembered his explanation, "and go straight into the mountain through a shaft—"

  "Shafts. Plural, as in more than one," T.J. said.

  T.J. and Dobbs exchanged a look, then Dobbs reached out, emptied the sugar cubes in the bowl onto the tablecloth and both T.J. and Bailey stiffened, looked up and caught each other's eye. Bailey'd been drugged once with a sugar cube like the ones Dobbs was arranging in some kind of pattern on the table in front of him.

  "If I'd known you still played with blocks I'd a'got you some for your birthday," T.J. commented.

  Bailey happened to glance at Brice and his face went rigid at the remark, every muscle tightened so there was no expression at all.

  Dobbs quickly built a solid platform of sugar cubes, six across and six down, no spaces in between, and then set the sugar bowl on the platform.

  "Instead of a mountain on top of the coal seam," he said in his made-for-radio voice, "let's pretend it's a building." He pointed to the sugar bowl. "This is the building."

  "If a mountain was a building, it'd have to be two hundred fifty floors tall," T.J. pointed out.

  "Fine. A two-hundred-fifty-floor building—"

  "That's twenty miles long and fifteen miles wide."

  Dobbs gave T.J. a look.

  "You want to explain this?"

  "You doin' jest fine, go on ahead."

  "If you'll hush up long enough—"

  "So this is a two-hundred-fifty-story building …" Bailey prompted, pointing to the sugar bowl perched atop the layer of sugar cubes.

  "And let's pretend it's sitting on a base of solid gold, four feet thick." Dobbs indicated the sugar cubes. "How would you get the gold out from under the building?”

  "Dig it out from the side, I guess," Bailey ventured.

  "Give that a shot," Dobbs said.

  Bailey began to carefully remove sugar cubes from beneath the sugar bowl but she'd only taken a few before the sugar bowl toppled over on its side.

  "Dig into the gold and just start hauling it away, and pretty soon the building will collapse on top of you," Brice said.

  "Point made." Bailey started to replace the sugar cube
s and bowl.

  "Let's leave the 'building' off so you can see the mine from above," Dobbs said.

  He took the bowl and set it aside, then pointed to the solid square of sugar cubes.

  "What if you dug into the side but didn't take out all the gold like you just did? What if you left big hunks of it behind to hold up the building while you removed all the gold around the hunks?"

  He began to remove every other sugar cube, leaving an empty space between them. When he was finished, he set the sugar bowl back on top and it sat stable.

  "Bravo!" Bailey cheered.

  Removing the bowl again to reveal the sugar cubes, he pointed to the empty spaces.

  "These are the plural mine shafts. The crossways shafts go from one side of the mine to the other. The longways shafts, which are three times as big, cut through the mountain from the front of the mine to the face."

  "A mine has a face?"

  "The face is where they're digging. So it gets farther and farther away from the front of the mine the deeper they dig."

  T.J. plucked a stray thread a couple of inches long off the front of his seldom-used suit jacket and stretched it out down the middle of the center mine shaft.

  "That's the belt line, a conveyor belt that carries the coal from where they're digging it out at the face down 'Main Street' to load on trucks out front."

  Dobbs pointed to the mine shaft on the right of Main Street. "That's Broadway," and on the left, "that's Boardwalk."

  "They name the shafts?" Bailey said, delighted. "Monopoly. I love that!"

  "Just those three, the same in every mine. The cross shafts that run crossways are numbered, starting at the front."

  Dobbs looked around on the table, lifted his napkin, scanned the condiments in the center of the table.

  "What are you looking for?" Bailey asked.

  He sighed, reached into the bowl where the dregs of his salad still resided, picked up a piece of lettuce and tore off several pieces about the size of fingernails.

  T.J. wagged his finger reproachfully. "If your mama saw you doin' that, she'd snatch you baldheaded."

  "Said the man who talks with his mouth full," Dobbs said as he reached out to the sugar-cube coal mine and placed a piece of lettuce in each one of the crossways shafts all the way down both sides of the longways shaft called Broadway.

  "The fans that get air to the miners—"

  "Brice already told me, they don't blow, they suck. What does that have to do with the salad that's plugging up the cross shafts along this shaft? The miners … what? Wanted to spiff the place up, so they hung some curtains?"

  "Bingo!" Dobbs cried so abruptly it startled her, then held out his fist to hers to bump. "That's exactly right! Huge pieces of plastic sheeting that stretch all the way across a cross shaft block the air flow, force the air back into the shaft." Bailey wrinkled her brow, so he explained further. "If it was water, the curtains are little dams that make the water go straight down the shaft to the face; you need the air where the miners are digging, have to suck out that methane. You can move the plastic around," he picked up two pieces of soggy lettuce and moved them to different cross shafts, "to direct the air flow anywhere you want it to go."

  "So the air is sucked in the front of the mine, flows around and around the tunnels in the maze directed by the little dams … the curtains … and then out the back?"

  "In the front of the mine, yes," T.J. said. "And back out the other side of the front. Coal mines is only open on one end. They ain't got no back doors."

  "Last Hope #2 does," Brice put in, affecting the tone of a querulous child contradicting the expert.

  T.J. rolled his eyes and Dobbs could see Bailey's eyes beginning to glaze over.

  "When the coal seam on #1 petered out, Northfield went around to the opposite side of the mountain and started digging #2 there." He was trying to make it simple.

  "So like the continental railroad, the two shafts met in the middle and there's an opening on both ends."

  "Close, but no cigar," T.J. said. "Last Hope Ollie #2 is open at both ends, but it's under #1, with an elevator that connects 'em."

  Brice grinned at Bailey. "See! There's that elevator you saw in the coal mine movie!"

  Dobbs and T.J. began to argue about the court order only a month ago that had closed both mines — now owned by Maxwell Crenshaw's coal company.

  "Froze all the assets — miners workin' that day just got up and walked out, left equipment where it was sittin'," she heard T.J. say before she excused herself and asked the waiter to direct her to the ladies’ room. She was done with sugar-cube coal mines.

  She became aware of the Muzak that'd been playing since they arrived, the musical canvas on which the atmosphere was painted. Like everything else, it was so tastefully subtle you didn't notice, an orchestrated remake of old rock songs. As she crossed the dining room toward the ladies’ room, “Hey Jude” morphed into “Let it Be.”

  The music was muffled by the soft, tasteful whoosh of the ladies' room door closing behind her. She stood in a … what would you call this room? A "parlor" adjacent to the facilities, as richly appointed as any luxury apartment she'd ever seen pictured in Better Homes and Gardens. Tasteful wingback chairs, loveseats, delicately carved tables with Tiffany lamps. There was a maid, whisking up imaginary trash off the immaculate carpet.

  She admitted to a shade of disappointment that the toilets themselves were not gilded in some way. She'd read that Queen Elizabeth had a special seat made for the royal tush. But the water spigots were gold-colored and the water flowed out of them down a golden trough into your hands.

  As she crossed the parlor on her way out, a woman seated in front of a small table she hadn't noticed before asked, "Would you like to freshen up your fingernail polish?"

  Seriously?

  Bailey was probably in an ever-shrinking population of those-dubbed-not-sufficiently-female because she had never in her life had a manicure or pedicure. She hesitated. The woman pointed to a contraption that appeared to be the love child of a miniature sun bed and a blow dryer.

  "They'll be dry in less than four minutes."

  It was her birthday, after all. By golly, she had a spare four minutes to spend being pampered. She sat down in the chair and offered her hand. The woman placed her wrist on a towel and lowered her fingers into the water in a bowl that was, like everything else within sight, ornate but tasteful, expensive-looking without being gauche, and colored gold. The instant Bailey touched the bowl, the world vanished.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bailey is seated in front of what is clearly designed to be a retro slot machine, a replica of the simpler machines of days gone by, made of metal so shiny you can see your reflection on its surface. Resting on the top is a lone red light that looks like it was lifted off the top of a 1950s-era police cruiser. Across the front are the words Crazy Diamonds.

  The screen displays three columns, each with revolving rows of images that have to match across all three columns for a win. The first column shows half a watermelon on top, the center row has two cherries and the bottom row has a big yellow diamond. In the next column, the top image is a cluster of grapes, below it half a watermelon and a lemon on the bottom. The third column displays a bell on the top, matches the cherries in the first column in the center but has a number nine at the bottom.

  She can hear “Hey Jude” fade to become “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” though it is muffled by the clanging of nearby machines. A sweet scent is barely detectable — perfume, its fragrance rich but subtle. It might not be a cheap knockoff after all.

  Then there is a sudden loud Clang! Clang! Clang! Colored lights reflect off the chrome surfaces on the machine in front of her from the revolving light on the machine next to it. A woman's voice squeals in delight and there is the sound of coins gushing out of the machine into the metal tray.

  The hand reaches out and takes hold of the red knob on the lever on the right side of the machine — and pulls the lever down. The
revolving rows spin … spin … spin. Then stop. Three cherries match in two of the columns on the bottom row, but the third image is a cluster of grapes. None of the other images match. The hand puts a token in the slot at the top of the machine. The hand is perfectly manicured and has rings on the index finger and the ring finger with rocks in them the size of raisins. If they're not zirconium …

  She pulls the lever and the rows begin to spin again.

  And then the image fades. Bailey can still see the machine — this time isn't a win either — but she can see through the image to the mini table that contains a dozen different colored bottles of fingernail polish where she has placed her own hand.

  Then the image was gone altogether and Bailey was back in the real world. She heard the manicurist ask her what color she'd like, her tone implying this wasn't the first time she'd asked.

  Yanking her fingers out of the bowl of water so frantically she splattered it into the manicurist's lap, Bailey jumped to her feet and ran out of the bathroom, momentarily disoriented in the huge dining room. When she spotted her table, she raced toward it, turning sideways to edge around chairs, almost colliding with a waiter who carried a tray with drinks balanced on his upturned palm.

  "I saw her!" she cried, interrupting an argument about Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback.

  "Saw who?" Brice asked.

  "The girl in the painting."

  "The girl in the painting was in the bathroom?" Dobbs said.

  "No, no. I saw her, like when I saw Macy after I touched the Adirondack chair."

  "Sit down, Bailey," Brice told her in his official, don't-argue-with-me voice. She sat. "And slow down. What did you see?"

  She tried to do as directed, but couldn't manage anything after the sitting-down part. Her words continued to pour out in a waterfall torrent.

  "I stopped at the manicurist station and when I touched the bowl of water on the table, I saw her. A vision. Like watching Macy Cosgrove get her hand stamped at the carnival. She's here! Right now. She's playing a slot machine. We have to find her."