by LS Hawker
His eyes opened, focused exactly on me. I started.
“How long you been standing there?”
“Awhile,” I said.
He sat up and scratched his head. “Petty, you know you’re not supposed to talk to me right when I wake up.” Dekker swiveled toward me and put his socked feet on the floor. “Holy shit, it’s cold,” he said. “You suppose it ever gets warm up here?”
I shrugged.
He sat blinking. “What time is it?”
“It’s almost six.”
“Mitch will be coming home soon.”
“Yes.” I wanted to talk to Dekker about all the things I was feeling, but I didn’t have the words.
“It’s kind of hard to believe we actually did what we said we were going to do,” he said. “Other than you kidnapping me at gunpoint, and me finding out you actually killed Michael Rhones and everything, this has been a pretty amazing road trip.”
I didn’t say anything, stung by Dekker’s words, remembering how he’d characterized me the day before—the boogeyman. I couldn’t help grimacing.
“That was a joke, Petty,” Dekker said. “You need to start getting used to that sort of thing. I don’t really believe you killed your dad. Or, the guy you thought was your dad. The guy who raised you.”
Even though I now knew Michael Rhones—Charlie Moshen—was not my father, I felt a pang in my stomach. He was the only dad I’d ever known. He was the one who’d trained me to disarm the old man with a shotgun in Salina. He was the one who’d taught me how to knock someone out with a punch to the temple. He was the one, as Dekker said, who’d raised me. That counted for something, no matter how crazy he was, no matter how strange.
“Dekker,” I said. “I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. How grateful I am that you’re my friend.”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. This was the first time I’d said anything so personal, and it felt as strange to me as it looked like it felt to him. But being around his family, even for such a short time, had shown me how friends act toward one another.
“Even though I had to kidnap you to make you my friend,” I added.
He laughed. “There you go,” he said. He reached for his jeans and pulled them on. “You might get the hang of this joke thing yet.”
Of course, I hadn’t been joking. Not at all.
“I’m starving,” he said. “Let’s go see what’s in the fridge.”
After we ate cereal, we washed our dishes by hand since there was no dishwasher. While Dekker showered, I looked around to see if there were any magazines or books, but I found none. I wished for the one I’d left behind with my suitcase and guns.
A weathered red Ford Taurus drove up and parked in front of the house, and the dog barked. I didn’t see how you could keep a dog outside with how cold it got up here, but he obviously wasn’t allowed in the cabin. Through the window, I saw Mitch get out of the car and walk to the house with the dog close behind. My palms got sweaty again, waiting for Mitch to unlock the door, and I couldn’t figure out why. Was I afraid he was going to reject me? Ask me to leave? That this trip had all been for nothing? Or was it just because I didn’t know him at all?
He came in, closed the door behind him. “Good morning,” he said.
I gripped the arms of the rocking chair, my heart pounding. I wished Dekker would come out of the bathroom already.
“Where is your friend?”
“He’s taking a shower,” I said.
“Good,” he said, sitting on the couch. “I wanted to talk to you alone.”
My hands got clammier and I rocked a little faster.
“I certainly appreciate his bringing you to me.” Mitch didn’t look directly at me. He jabbed up his glasses. “I’d like to repay him. He told me about the show coming up.”
For a second I didn’t know what he was talking about but then I remembered Dekker’s drumming job in Kansas City.
“I’d like to see that he makes it back in time to rehearse, but I’d also like us to have more time together.” Mitch reached out and took hold of my chair arm, halting the rocking motion. I had to force myself not to brace my feet and push against his restraining grip.
“Okay,” I said, moving my hand that was nearest to his to my lap.
He fixed me with an intent gaze. “But I think he’s hesitant to leave you here. He’s willing to miss the show just to make sure you’re safe—and I appreciate that about him—but I think if you tell him he can go ahead and leave, he’ll understand that you’re okay staying here by yourself.” With every emphasized word he jerked the chair a tiny bit closer. “What do you think?”
I didn’t think I was ready for that. But when would I be?
“How will I get back there?” I said. Even though earlier I’d been thinking about living here with Mitch, the reality of it made me nervous. I reached up to scratch the bump on my shoulder and dug into the injury by accident, forgetting the bump had been replaced by a laceration. It hurt.
“I’ll just put you on a plane when you’re ready,” he said with a smile, his tiny eyes crinkling at the corners. “But I don’t want to lose you again.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, you need to put others before yourself sometimes, don’t you agree?”
I nodded slowly, trying to discern why his words made me anxious. What he said was the truth, but I couldn’t help but feel accused somehow.
“When he comes out of the bathroom,” Mitch said, “why don’t you tell him I’m taking you all on a tour of the mine. And then you can tell him you want to spend some alone time with dear old dad, and he should go on back without you.”
I wished I could talk to Dekker about this alone, but I didn’t know when we’d get the chance. I didn’t say anything. Mitch gave my hand a squeeze, patted it and rose from the couch. I fought the desire to wipe my hand off. His was spongy and moist, nothing like Michael Rhones’s callused ones.
“I’m going to make some coffee.” He smiled at me and went in the kitchen.
I didn’t really care about seeing a mine, but if it was important to him, it was important to me. I knew from TV that people liked to show other people stuff as a way of explaining themselves, what they liked, what made them who they were. I wanted to know who he was because he was my father. I just needed to get used to him.
MITCH HAD A cup of coffee waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom. I sat next to him on the couch.
“So tell me,” he said. “How did Michael Rhones die?”
“He had a heart attack,” Petty said.
“Heart attack,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “So young. So sad. But it’s brought you to me, so it’s not all bad, is it?”
It seemed to me then that maybe Petty had inherited some of her social awkwardness from Mitch, because who would say such a thing? I decided to steer the conversation in another direction.
“Why don’t you tell Mitch about Randy King and all that?” I said to Petty.
She told him about the forced betrothal, but she didn’t mention how much money there was. She also didn’t mention the arrest warrants or any other unpleasantness. As she talked, Mitch’s eyes went flat and his expression hardened.
“That bastard,” Mitch said. “That coldhearted, manipulative bastard.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s Randy.”
“I meant Michael,” Mitch said.
To my confusion, I was strangely offended by this little outburst. “Michael thought he was taking care of Petty,” I said. “I think your . . . relationship with Marianne drove him completely over the edge.”
The look Mitch shot in my direction chilled me. But he brightened again when his eyes focused on Petty. “We’ll make sure this Randy King doesn’t bother you.” Mitch stood and drained his coffee cup. “Are you ready
to see the mine?”
We followed Mitch out to his Taurus, where he clipped dark protective lenses over his glasses. Petty surprised me by getting in the front seat. She was obviously determined to try harder today. But there was no legroom in back, and I had to wedge my knees in behind the passenger seat.
Mitch drove the dirt road west. “Every once in a while I get to give tours of the mine, so I’m going to give you my whole spiel. Is that all right?”
“Sure,” I said. Honestly, I was more interested in how he ended up in this solitary job, living alone, collecting Precious Moments. But I didn’t want to be rude. I figured we’d get to all that eventually.
He cleared his throat. “The Black Star mine opened in 1869. Over a million tons of pyrite were taken out of the mountain before it closed in 1963.”
“What’s pyrite used for?” Petty said.
Mitch’s head jerked toward her, apparently pleased that she’d formed an entire sentence. “Lots of things.”
“Gunpowder, for one,” I said. “Paper production. Crystal radios before vacuum tubes. Now it’s used in lithium batteries and solar panels and jewelry.”
Mitch’s tired face clouded in the mirror, and I berated myself for stealing his tour-guide thunder.
“Why’d they close the mine down, then?” Petty asked Mitch.
He didn’t answer for a minute, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to answer this question. I remained silent.
“Because of nineteenth-century mining practices,” Mitch said, “the whole mountainside is contaminated. Now it’s a ghost mine.”
He drove us up switchbacks lined with towering pine and aspen trees. I saw no other houses or cabins, and few cars, just massive boulders breaking up the forest. The sky was a deep blue and the sun bright. At the top of the pass there was an expanse of level unwooded land, where Mitch pulled off and stopped the car. “You ready?’
“Sure,” Petty said. We got out. There were some old, rusty buildings and piles of crushed rock, as if they’d just stopped mining that morning.
“Over there is where the original opening was,” Mitch said, pointing. “In those days miners used a technique called longwall mining. It was all picks and shovels, digging into the earth and making rooms. They put timbers in there to prevent cave-ins. Miners at the turn of the century worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. They were paid three-fifty a day, and children who sorted the ore were paid fifty cents a day.”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be a kid back then, not going to school, working in a dark hole day after day for just fifty cents. Petty appeared to be contemplating this too.
“The mine was automated in 1952,” he went on. “More than five hundred men lost their jobs. Paiute’s population decreased by almost half.”
We walked along, looking up at the barren mountain. No vegetation anywhere. Just dirt and rocks, and some ancient timbers. The openings had all been filled in—likely to keep adventurous kids from tumbling down the shafts.
I’d never seen a mine from the 1800s before, and it was an awesome sight. I wished I could spend more time there, but I needed to get on the road tomorrow morning at the latest. With this thought, I had to push away my nagging conscience. Petty would be fine without me.
We walked around the buildings. Planted in front of an old shaft covered in barbed wire was a sign depicting a stick figure falling down a hole accompanied by rocks. It said: DANGER! ABANDONED MINE! STAY OUT! STAY ALIVE! I wished I had a camera with me, or even a cell phone.
Mitch continued his canned speech. “In 1972,” he said, “the mountain fractured, which means it collapsed on itself, and many of the shafts disappeared. It’s unknown how many miners were trapped in the shafts. The mine finally closed down completely after that.”
We walked around a little longer before Mitch said, “Back to the car.”
I followed behind him and Petty and got in the backseat. Mitch drove about a mile down the mountain and then turned off at another dirt road, which led to a huge body of water in a valley. A finger of land, a berm, maybe ten feet wide and several hundred feet long, jutted out into the middle of the lake. Mitch parked. We got out of the car again and stood looking down at it.
The water at the lake’s center was blue, but near the edges it was rust-colored in some places, tannish in others. Twenty feet from the shore stood an ancient wooden sign with the faded word FORBIDDEN handwritten on it.
“That’s the tailings pond,” Mitch said.
“Pond?” Petty said. “Back home we call that a lake.” Then she nudged her shoulder into me, something she’d never done before, and it sent tingles up my arm, to my annoyance. I didn’t want to feel that way about her. A certainty that we would soon part ways and probably never see each other again filled me with gloom.
“Break it up, you two,” Mitch said, jovially, but with an edge. He was the proverbial dad with a shotgun on the porch.
“What’s tailings?” Petty asked, her face red.
“It’s what’s left over after the ore has been processed,” Mitch said. “This tailings pond is special, if you can call it that. It’s one of the deepest in North America at over seven hundred feet, so you can imagine how long it took to build that berm out there.”
“What’s the pond for?” Petty said.
“To collect the contaminated runoff from the mountain,” Mitch said. “What you’re looking at is some of the most acidic water found on earth.”
“Why’s it taken so long to go into remediation?” I said.
“Money, of course,” Mitch said. “Lawsuits have gone back and forth to see who’s responsible.”
“What does remediation mean?” Petty said.
“Cleanup,” Mitch said. “Water is released a little at a time through that treatment facility over there. See it? It will take a long time to clean this up. It’s a very delicate operation. But that’s job security for me.”
He started toward the water. “Let’s walk down by the pond.”
I followed several steps before I realized Petty hadn’t moved. I turned.
“You two go on ahead,” she said, loitering by the sign.
I recognized but didn’t understand the fear in her eyes. I walked back to where she stood. “Come on,” I said.
She shook her head.
“It’s okay.”
“I’m not going down there, no matter what you say,” she said.
“Everything all right?” Mitch called.
Petty’s hands were shaking.
“Okay if we just go back to the cabin?” I said to Mitch. “This altitude is kind of getting to me.”
“Oh,” Mitch said. “All right.” He looked disappointed but began trudging toward the car.
Once we were all buckled into the Taurus and driving down the mountain, Petty said, “I didn’t care about coming to see the mine, but you’re right, Dekker. This is pretty interesting.”
Petty was agitated, eager to please her dad, I could see. I felt embarrassed for her.
“How long have you worked here?” I asked Mitch.
“Almost twenty years.” He pointed at a little building a ways from the tailings pond. “There’s my office, such as it is. Gets pretty lonely up here.”
“I’ll bet it does,” I said.
We drove in silence for a while, and I watched the towering pines slice the sky through my window. This would be an amazing place to live.
“When we get back to the cabin, I’m going to take a nap,” Mitch said.
“And I’d like to go for a run on that dirt road by the cabin,” Petty said.
“A run?” Mitch said.
“Yes, sir—Mitch. I run every day I can.”
“If Michael Rhones had let her go to public school,” I said, “she’d have been the star of the track team.”
The bac
k of Petty’s neck got red.
“Is that right,” Mitch said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’ve got a bit of a wildlife problem—bears and mountain lions.”
“Where would be a safe place I could go around here?”
Mitch stared at her. “There really isn’t one, darling.”
This term of endearment, seemingly out of nowhere, disturbed me, but I didn’t know why.
We pulled up to the cabin.
“Do you have any pictures of my mom?” Petty asked.
Startled, Mitch said, “Of course.”
“How about family photographs?” I said.
He fixed his small eyes on me from the rearview mirror. “What do you mean?”
“You know,” I said. “Of you and Marianne and Petty.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“How come you don’t have any of them hanging up in the cabin?”
His eyes went flat and he didn’t answer right away. Then a big cheery grin replaced the look. “Well,” he said. “Aren’t you quite the interrogator?”
He didn’t answer the question, but I let it drop. It was always weird to me what different people thought was too personal.
Mitch got out of the car, and Petty and I followed. She was the last one through the front door.
Mitch stood in the hallway and stretched. “I sleep with a box fan going year-round, so don’t worry about being quiet on my account.”
“Okay,” Petty said.
“But no funny business, mister,” he said, wagging his big finger at me.
I tensed.
He glanced at his watch. “It’s eleven now. See you around four. Then I’ll make you all a nice dinner.”
He went into his bedroom and closed the door.
I sat staring at my hands, trying to untangle everything that was going on in my head. I needed to leave, but I was uncomfortable leaving Petty here alone with Mitch. We still didn’t really know anything about him. Just because he was Petty’s father didn’t make him a good man.
