by George Wier
I stopped by my car, placed the journal, all wrapped up as it was with cellophane, under the driver’s seat and out of sight. I locked the car all the way around and then followed Sandy to his battered Ford pickup and climbed inside.
“That woman,” he said, depositing a pretty beat-up five gallon brown paper sack filled with flashlights and other odds and ends on the floorboard at my feet. The old truck smelled like spent cigarette butts and old sweat.
“Who?” I asked.
“My wife. She’s good,” he said, “don’t get me wrong, but she thinks too much.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I like a woman who thinks for herself.”
“Got one of those, do you?”
“Damn right,” I said.
“She trouble?”
“Plenty.”
“Good,” he said, and turned the ignition key. “I hate bein’ wrong. She pretty?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Even better.”
*****
Instead of going to the power plant main gate, Sandy turned off to the left several hundred yards to the south of it, got out and fished out a key for the large pad lock on the single bar steel gate, pulled through, then went back and locked it up again.
“The lock was on,” he said, once back inside the truck, “which usually means that no one is around. But just in case, if anybody sees us, you’re an inspector from the state office.”
“You mean lie about it? I don’t have any kind of a badge to convince anybody.”
“So. Just act like a jerk and stare them down. That usually works, because these people can’t think for themselves. They’ve got to have somebody higher up do their thinking for them.”
“Okay,” I said.
We bounced along a muddied, caliche-gravel path through stands of trees and across an open field. Cows stopped chewing on wet grass and stared at us.
“All of this was strip-mined a few years back,” Sandy moved his hand to take in the whole field. “Lignite field, you know. Had to put it all back the way they found it, or mostly, and it’s starting to grow back a little now.”
I nodded.
We went over a hill and down a winding course that threaded close to the trees again.
“It was found during the lignite years, early on.”
“Who found it?” I asked.
“Me,” Sandy said.
“Oh.”
“I thought about not reporting it, but then somebody else would have fallen in and gotten themselves killed, and I didn’t want anything like that bothering me, you know?”
“Yeah.”
After ten minutes of driving through the rough countryside, Sandy pulled off the narrow gravel path and behind a stand of yaupon scrub and stopped.
“We walk from here,” he said. “I don’t want my truck tracks anywhere near it.”
“Fine,” I said.
We got out. The clouds overhead were dispersing and to the west the sun was trying to poke through.
“Good timing,” Sandy said. “I didn’t want to get too wet.”
We walked, cutting through the scrub brush along what could be described as no more than a cow path. My shoes picked up a good deal of mud, but I scraped it off whenever I could; here on a mat of thick weeds, there on a fallen tree branch.
After ten minutes we came around yet another stand of brush behind a high board fence that looked as out of place in a cow pasture as my Dr. Martens shoes.
Behind the fence I could make out a tin roof.
“It’s supposed to look like a barn, but it doesn’t have much floor on the inside of it, if you know what I mean.”
Sandy rounded the fence and I followed. We came to yet another padlock that resembled the first and Sandy used a key from his large key ring, opened the lock and we slipped through.
The wooden building was nestled inside the fence with no more than a few feet between them. The door in front of us had a simple board with a single nail through it into the front wall which Sandy turned easily. The door opened.
Sandy reached in the bag, clicked on his flashlight and inspected the interior.
“Anybody home?” he called out. I heard a dim echo. Sandy laughed.
“Nope,” he said. “Just us chickens.”
He reached up and tugged on a string and an electric light came on.
*****
The hole was twelve feet wide by about ten long, and encompassed half the interior floor space.
The smell was musty and strong.
“Smells like mold and chlorine,” I said, then I pegged it. “Bats, I’ll bet.”
“Hell, yes,” Sandy said. “Used to be millions of ‘em, but we killed most of ‘em.”
“Another environmental catastrophe,” I said.
“That’s what I thought, too. Ever’ time I have to slap a mosquito, I think about all those dead bats.”
From the electric bulb overhead and Sandy’s wandering flashlight I could make out the rough, dry walls of the hole. Ten feet down the topsoil gave out and what appeared to be shale and rock took its place.
“Over here,” Sandy said.
I looked where his light flicked and there was a steel boom against a side wall with a basket configuration and a motor and winch.
“That doesn’t look promising,” I said.
“Oh, it’s safe. If it can hold Mike Fields, it can hold you and me.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said.
Sandy laughed again, and I couldn’t help smiling.
*****
“Stupid question,” I said, fifty feet below the surface. Above, the dwindling light looked a world away, and below, only blackness. Sandy had one hand around the steel cable and the other around the flashlight.
“What?” he asked, and shined his light on the walls.
“How do we get back up?”
“Damn, forgot about that!” he said.
“What?”
“Just kidding. Look, all we have to do is give the line a jerk to make sure it’s tight, then hit a switch down there that reverses the winch.”
“Oh.”
Down, down into the darkness. The air grew cooler and more dank.
The floor came up to meet us, or at least it felt that way, and I removed the safety rope and clip from the cable.
“How far down are we?” I asked, and my voice traveled long and far and came back to me in a faint echo.
“Couple of hundred feet.”
“Just asking,” I said.
Sandy handed me a flashlight
I clicked my light on, panned it about. The hole above us had tapered until it was a very narrow entrance to the small cavern where we stood. To my left was another narrow entryway to a larger, darker space beyond.
“Not that way,” Sandy said.
“Core rods?” I asked.
“You betcha. Come on,” he said.
*****
Sandy led me through an even narrower passage that opened out after a dozen yards into a large cavern that swallowed our light.
I felt a drop of water on the top of my head.
“It’s raining,” I said.
“You’re no spelunker, Bill Travis.”
“I know.”
“Stalactites dripping is what that is. Always dripping, especially after a hard rain.”
I followed Sandy along a limestone trail. The place was awash with little sparkles of light reflecting back from our flashlight beams. Great stalagmites grew from the cavern floor like the boles of bald cypress. Pools of translucent and milky water were everywhere.
“Watch your step, Bill,” Sandy said.
“Sure thing.”
“It’s the next cavern over.”
“The chests?”
“Yeah.”
I followed him along the undulating path, the rough, hard floor of the cavern dipping down toward little pools of water, then abruptly up again over small ridges. I would have to do some studying up on caves and cave systems.
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We went through another narrow crevice and we had to turn sideways, duck down and slink our way through.
The cavern we emerged into was decidedly different from the first. Here the stalagmites were larger, some meeting their mates a third of the way up to form great columns. How long would that take? I did know that they formed slowly, over hundreds and even thousands of years drip by infinitesimal drip. How much building matter could be contained in one drop of water? A few thousand molecules? Who knew? All I did know was that the cavern was old. Older than man? Perhaps. Was it here when dinosaurs roamed the Earth? Probably not.
“Look, Bill,” Sandy said.
I turned my light to follow his, and there, high up on the cavern wall was a treasure beyond price.
We were looking at a pictograph mural of vast extent, etched into the wall. It began six feet up and went as high as thirty feet. I began to imagine the amount of labor the endeavor had required, and all of it high work. Where were the pole marks against the walls? An image leapt into my head of a tower of natives standing on the shoulders of the one below him until there was a neat ladder of six or seven of them. God! Who knew how it was done?
“Indians,” I said. “But which tribe?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Sandy said. “Maybe many different tribes over lots of years. It just... it feels old.”
“Yeah.”
We went along the wall slowly, moving our lights between it and the floor so as to assure our footing.
There were symbols there that I had seen in textbooks, and many others I’d never seen, perhaps no one in modern times had seen. The sun and moon were prominent, not in size, but in recognizability and repetition. Warriors with spears and bows, tepees, pregnant maidens, bison herds, strange floating icons which were likely weather phenomena or shooting stars. A wooly mammoth being brought down with shillelaghs! I picked out a comet. And then came the oddest and creepiest of all: a sailing ship, complete with square-rigged sails and ropes and a bow effigy of a woman with large breasts.
“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah. Bill, we can’t stay here long. There’s a stack of core rods over there. No one knows how radioactive they are, so it’s better we keep moving.”
I swung my flashlight in the direction he indicated, and thirty feet away on the floor of the cavern was a dingy metal rack with five steel tubes.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Come on. We’re almost there.”
*****
“It’s gone,” Sandy said. He stood on a hump of limestone and shined his light into a large alcove.
“Thieves,” I said. “Desecrators.”
“Desecrators,” Sandy repeated. “That’s a big word. Sounds pretty bad.”
“It is. It’s anybody that robs a tomb or destroys something of benefit to mankind. How many chests were there?”
“Five big ones and one small one.”
“The small one...” I began.
“Yeah. The one that was haunted,” he said.
Sandy shined his light along the floor close by.
“Check this out,” he said. I saw what he meant. There were grooves in the cavern floor, going back the way we’d come.
“Tell me what you think,” I said.
“I didn’t think anybody knew about the crates except me.”
“Did you ever open them?”
He hesitated.
“You’d better spill it,” I said.
“Okay,” he signed. “I did open one.”
“The haunted one?”
“No. I wouldn’t have touched that one for anything. No. One of the others.”
“And you took something,” I said, matter-of-factly.
“Yeah.”
“What’d you find, and what’d you take?”
“A croker sack full of gold, rubies, and big green gems.”
“What about the skeletons?” I asked. “You said something before about skeletons.”
“Oh. Oh shit. You’re right.”
“What?”
“They’re gone.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was growing dark by the time we made it back to Sandy and Dotty Jones’ place. A full moon was on the rise, its white, skeletal glow spectral between a branchwork of dark oak and other, unnamable trees.
Inside, the television was silent. Mary Jo, Dotty and three kids sat around the living room coffee table playing Monopoly.
“Who’s winning?” I asked.
Mary Jo looked up as we tromped in.
“Bill!” she said. “You looked like you fell in a hole somewhere.”
“Practically,” I said.
Dotty and Sandy exchanged knowing looks.
“Sorry to interrupt your game,” I said, “but I think it’s time I took you home, Mary Jo.”
“Nonsense. I’m winning.”
And so she was. There was a stack of bills in front of her nearly an inch high while all the other players were dealing with singleton ones, fives, twenties and fifties. Most of Mary Jo’s bills were yellow and orange.
“Looks like it,” I said.
Sandy and I stood there over their shoulders and watched. It was all over but the shouting. One kid, Ames, the littlest, went around the board three times dodging all of Mary Jo’s hotels and paying out most of the two hundred he collected each time to the pile in the middle of the board. He was stuck in jail and about to roll the dice again when there was a resounding double thump at the front door.
I felt a chill.
If that was friendly knock, then I had never heard one.
The house was suddenly quiet. Not a movement, not a peep came from the table. Mary Jo’s eyes met mine. They were eyes of fear.
“Open up, goddammit!” someone outside shouted.
Sandy was moving toward the door on the balls of his feet. I grasped his elbow and shook my head “no” silently when he turned to look back at me.
“Let me,” I whispered.
I moved behind the front door. I reached over and turned the lock very slowly, hoping it couldn’t be heard outside.
The man outside cursed, as if to himself, although I wasn’t ready to rule out that he had someone with him. Then I heard it: “Goddamned niggers.”
I mouthed to Sandy: “You got a gun?”
It was a stupid question, I thought. Sandy was a felon, on parole. He would never be allowed to own a gun again in his life.
“Yes,” he nodded.
He reached behind the chair in the corner and brought out a twelve gauge shotgun. I watched as he thumbed the safety off.
I mouthed to Dotty: “Back door. Lock it.”
I’d almost told her to call the sheriff’s office, but then I remember-ed that Sandy was a felon. The sheriff was the last person we needed to call.
The front door shook in its facing to a hard rap from outside and I nearly leapt out of my skin.
“Open up!” the man at the door shouted. “Or I’m coming inside.”
From five feet away and almost a forty-five degree angle, Sandy held the scattergun pointed at the center of the front door.
“Hey out there!” I raised my voice. “Anybody coming in is coming in dead!”
I listened close beside the door. There were whispers and a squish of shoes going around the corner of the house out there. They were circling around. Then I heard it. A loud sigh, not three feet from me on the other side of the door. There was more than one of them.
“Look” the gruff voice said. “I’m going to make this easy. Tell that nigger in there to throw out that sack of gold and shit, or we’ll burn your asses out of there.”
I looked over at Mary Jo. She was trying to say something, but I couldn’t make out what she was mouthing at me.
“Get those kids down on the floor,” I hissed at her, as quietly as I could, but so that I knew she would hear me.
Sandy took two steps to the front door, coming perfectly in line with it.
I looked at him standing there, casting
his tall shadow on the front door from the lamp behind him. He was shaking, but not with fear.
“Nobody,” he said quietly, “is going to threaten my family.”
“Sandy,” I said, “don’t.”
But he did.
The roar was that of lightning splitting a tree, and it reverberated inside the house and in my head for a good long time to come.
*****
Before opening the front door I reached over and plucked the shotgun from Sandy’s hand. I peeked outside.
There was a horrible jagged hole in the center of the Jones’ front door, and outside, at the foot of the steps, I saw another jagged hole in the chest of the man who had been standing there.
His breathing was ragged and there was a perplexity on his face. Several feet away there was a large silvery handgun glinting in the porch light. I suddenly knew it was what he’d rapped the front door with.
I turned to Sandy.
“This is my shotgun, Sandy,” I said. “It was always my gun. I came to ask you if you would take me coon hunting and I brought my own gun, got it?”
He stood there, in shock. In the front yard the wounded man was moaning, if not dying.
“You’re a felon. You see a parole officer once a week. Remember? It’s my gun, got it?” I asked again.
“Okay,” he said.
“Good. There’s another one out there. I’m going out there. You’re staying in here. Close this door and lock it. And call the Sheriff.”
“Thank you, Bill,” he said.
I glanced back at the children, who were looking at their father’s back and then at me. A knowingness passed between us, all of us.
“Thank you, Mr. Bill,” the oldest boy said.
Dotty was standing there behind the table, her hands pressed against her mouth.
“Take care of them, Mary Jo,” I said, then turned to face the open doorway and the dying man beyond.
“Lock it behind me, Sandy,” I said, and went out into the night.
For any man or woman there is a fluidity to things that takes hold whenever action is required and thought and reason must be thrust aside. The air takes on a crispness as it surges into the lungs. The thrum of the heart beats a drum-like pace against the inner ear. The throat constricts and becomes an arid yet slippery ditch that words cannot climb out of. There is only intention, and the being is salved by the purity of it. It is more powerful, more real than any drug-induced state could hope to emulate, and in the final analysis it is euphoric — so euphoric it hurts. That’s what I felt as I stepped down from Sandy Jones’ front porch.
