Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  Other than the works of nature, this place was all business.

  The rail tracks exited the tunnel at the high end of the canyon. The tracks fed into the skeleton of a building that held the rusted guts of some sort of machinery. Walter would know the name, would know the mechanism, but I hazarded a guess that the cemented gravel had gotten crushed in there. Running downhill was a long ditch littered with boulders and cobbles and pebbles—a sluiceway, artery of the gold country. I could see its bones surviving here and there, stretches of wood planking forming the walls and huge riffle blocks crisscrossed along the bottom, stepping downhill in the gut of the sluice box. At the head of the sluice, just uphill from me, sagged a rusting metal tank. Quite clearly it was a water tank, to store the water to hose the crushed gravel down the sluice. To free the gold. I had certainly gotten the hang of sluicing.

  It appeared that this slim canyon might feed into Notch Valley, which, if I had my bearings straight, was downhill from here.

  I ventured farther outside to see what I could see.

  What I now saw was another building of sorts, more a bunker nestled into the side of the hill, just uphill of the tunnel. Its door was rust-patched iron, secured by a heavy iron latch with a heavy iron padlock.

  The latch hung open, the padlock unhooked.

  How far was I supposed to proceed? All the way in there?

  I went to the door and knocked, calling out hello, feeling monumentally foolish.

  No answer. No surprise.

  There was nothing for it but to have a quick look inside. I grasped the iron handle and pulled the door open. Daylight streamed in but nevertheless it took a moment for my eyes to adjust, to penetrate the gloom inside. No need to step in. From the doorway I could ID this room as a storage space. It was cluttered with equipment, stuff jammed in so tight that I could not tell the armature of one from the leg of another. Some stuff quickly recognizable: shovels, a wheelbarrow, buckets. Other stuff Walter could name. All of it in a state of rust and disrepair, dense with history. A maze of a pathway wound through the room.

  And then my attention shifted to the shelves carved into the bedrock walls. Half a dozen mercury flasks sat on one thick shelf.

  I felt a sudden relief.

  Only half a dozen. I had expected more. I had expected a shitload.

  That is, if this was where Henry had obtained the flask he took to the river, where his father died.

  So was this the place? The door latch was open, the padlock unlocked. He didn’t like enclosed spaces but with the light streaming in, surely he could have brought himself the few steps necessary to take one of those bottles off the shelf.

  And then rent a horse or lash it to a backpack and transport it. And then open the flask and dump it.

  Jesus Henry.

  I envisioned his peeling nose, peeling palms, pink skin, some sort of rash. Contact dermatitis? Hyper-sensitive, surely, from a lifetime of messing around with mercury, dancing with the vapors.

  I backed out of the doorway and shoved the damn door shut.

  Henry Shelburne’s mania was not my problem.

  His Glock was my problem.

  I turned my back on the bunker, spinning around to return to the others and give Henry what I’d found, a chunk of the deep blue freaking lead, and pray that satisfied him.

  Rather than retrace my journey through the tunnel I decided to go downhill and take what I judged a shortcut.

  As I moved, something at the base of the opposite hillside caught my eye. It was a bald spot in the vegetation where black rock cropped out. In this pearly light I thought I detected a wink of mica and quartz. My heart jumped. This was it, right? This was the door to fat city.

  I charged across the little canyon, using the wooden riffle blocks in the ditch as steppingstones, and put my hand lens on the outcrop. It took no time at all to identify the rock as flinty hornfels. It took a little more time to locate the squared crystal faces speckling the rock. In some faces the carbon inclusions were muddied, unfinished. In some faces the carbon formed crosses so distinct it looked like they’d been drawn with a pencil.

  I fingered a perfect specimen, a flared Maltese cross that suggested obsession, crusade.

  If I were Henry I would take a hammer and chisel and pop that talisman out.

  But I wasn’t Henry and I decided not to take the time or invest the effort to hack off a sample. If he’d explored this canyon, surely he found the outcrop. And if he had, I cursed him. He could have steered me here to begin with. But I got it. I knew why he’d sent me into the tunnel. If he’d found the hornfels, he’d have filled in the rest of the story.

  By now, so could I.

  This hornfels was formed a long time ago when magma had punched into an ancient river channel. Subsequently—still a long time ago—during a period of uplift, that intersection got exposed and eroded. And the auriferous gravels mixed with broken-off chips of hornfels, and in the due course of time and travel downstream, the stuff got re-cemented by river sand and clay. And chunks of that conglomerate got scattered hither, thither, and yon.

  And that was the source of the chunk of ore Robert Shelburne brought to our lab.

  I pictured Henry standing here, telling himself the story. Yesterday? Day before? And then in a fever hunting around for that magical junction, that giant hornfels riffle in the old blue lead, that collector of gold.

  Reburied, over the course of the years. Volcanic eruption, landslide, who knew?

  Perhaps buried right here in this slim canyon, or in the hillside before me, or somewhere in the tunneled hillside behind me.

  Perhaps right beneath our feet.

  Right Henry? How’s it feel? To be so near, and yet so far. You can’t just haul a water cannon up here and hose away the mountain.

  So you look to the likely. To the drift tunnels.

  You can’t go in there yourself. Your brother disappoints. So you send me in, in hopes that the junction has been breached, in there. Tough luck Henry. It wasn’t. Although it’s quite likely to be around here somewhere.

  I shrugged.

  Not my problem.

  I turned to go.

  There was a path on the tunnel side of the sluiceway, an access route I guessed, reinforced with occasional rock steps. I crossed the ditch and took the miners’ route down.

  As I descended, all thoughts of cross-studded rocks and ancient gold went by the wayside.

  I saw smoke.

  16

  At the bottom of the sluiceway the land leveled out.

  I was back in Notch Valley.

  Several yards beyond was the campfire ring. Sitting around the campfire were the three men I’d left at the main tunnel entrance. Robert and Walter sat side by side on a log on one side of the ring. Henry sat on a low boulder on the other side. Around his waist he wore a belt bag, which pouched next to the holster. His Glock hand rested on the belt bag.

  The little fire struggled.

  As he watched me approach, Henry picked up a ferny spray of dried mountain misery and tossed it onto the embers and the fire leapt to life and Henry explained in his fragile soulless voice, “The odor repels insects.”

  Holy hell it was some kind of bizarre camp-out.

  Henry nodded at an unoccupied boulder and I came over and took a seat. So chilled that I hunched toward the fire and held out my hands.

  My eyes caught Walter’s eyes and I read caution there.

  Henry watched me intently, the way a kid who’s built a campfire in the woods waits for Mom’s approval. Mom nodded, cautious. Good work, Henry. Now let’s go home and by the way you’re grounded for life.

  Henry spoke. “What did you find?”

  I cast about. Where to begin?

  He said, “You came all the way.”

  “How did you…?”

  Walter cut in. “We heard you.”

  Oh yeah. Back up at the bunker. Knocking at the door. Shouting hello.

  “What did you find?” Henry repeated.

  I
swallowed. Whatever I said in answer was going to have consequence.

  “What did you find?” he said again, Henry the fixated kid who keeps on asking asking asking…

  Be very careful, lady. You’ve got to give him something.

  As I hesitated I noticed Robert’s keen attention. Nearly as keen as his brother, it seemed, to learn if I’d found something worthy in the tunnel.

  What could I say? The gravel was not blooming gold. The miners had stopped, given up, run out of money to cover the costs. All I’d found in there was the ancient bearer of treasure—the deep blue lead. Henry awaited my answer. I thought, it’s deeply risky to bullshit this life-long seeker of legends. Very slowly, very carefully, I put my field kit on the ground and opened it. I withdrew the chunk of cemented gravel that I’d hacked free.

  I held it up so that all three men could see it.

  In the pearly light the rock face looked blue-gray, like the face of an ice crevasse. For a flash I thought I saw Walter respond, thought I glimpsed the Dogtown boy who fell in love with painted nuggets and grew up to thrill to the geology of the deep blue lead. But Walter just jerked a shoulder in the direction of Henry and the gun, and gave me a look. Focus, dear.

  Henry focused. He was examining the rock with a disciple’s concentration. His face twitched, like a fly had buzzed him. Shoo fly. His hands began to shake. The gun bobbed on his knees. He said, “Please give it to me.”

  I could not reach him. I’d have to stand and take three steps to hand the rock to him. I thought that over.

  “Please bring it to me, Cathy.”

  “It’s Cassie,” I said. Like that mattered.

  “Cassie Cassie Cassie Cassie.” He nodded to himself. “Cassie.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Robert and Walter on alert. Waiting for something? Waiting for me. I leaned forward and tossed the rock to Henry. It landed behind him.

  He did not turn to look. His hands steadied on the gun. “Only a child falls for that trick.”

  “It wasn’t a …”

  “I’m not your brother Henry.”

  I twitched. Hard. Like I’d been punched.

  “My brother told me about your brother who died. We have the same name. It’s only a name, Cathy.”

  “Cassie,” I said, automatically.

  “I have trouble with names,” he said.

  So the fuck did I.

  Still having trouble with Henrys. It was more than a name that linked the two Henrys, it was the fragility of a boy with hemophilia and a man with mercury poisoning, and it was guilt, Robert’s guilt about his brother and my guilt about my brother, and isn’t that a kicker that guilt trumps logic every time?

  Oh boy, get a grip Cathy.

  I watched Henry’s hands on the Glock. Shaking again. One twitch and his finger trips the trigger and then he shoots his brother. Or Walter. Or me. Accidentally, on purpose, doesn’t matter, shot is shot.

  He said, “How did your brother…”

  “Accident,” I snapped.

  “What more did you find?”

  Short attention span, Henry? My mind raced. I gave him the only thing I had. I jerked a thumb, pointing uphill. “I found an outcrop of chiastolite hornfels.”

  “Is that all?”

  Well that answered that. He’d already seen it. And it wasn’t enough. Okay then, I’d make it enough. “Somewhere around here, Henry, you’ve got hornfels intersecting an auriferous channel. Maybe near the existing tunnel, maybe a deeper or parallel channel. Maybe somewhere out here.”

  Henry listened.

  Walter jumped in. “That’s right, Henry. The channels were laid down in different ages. You can have later channels intersecting earlier channels, channels occupying different positions laterally as well as in elevation—all in the same general area. You understand the geology, son?”

  Henry shifted his fevered gaze to Walter. “Not like you do.”

  “Nevertheless, you’ve had a couple of days to look around.”

  Henry said, “A couple of weeks.”

  ~ ~ ~

  A couple of weeks?

  Walter and I exchanged a look. Had we misremembered Robert’s story, back at the lab? I could have sworn Robert had told us that his father died a month ago, and then a week later he and Henry got together to go through their father’s things. Which was when they’d found the ore specimen in the attic. And then—two-plus weeks after that—Henry had gone off hunting, leaving the so-called suicide note.

  Robert had not said what Henry was doing in those two-plus weeks in between finding the rock and setting out to find the source.

  Shit.

  Robert gaped at his brother. Surprised as we were.

  Henry stared back.

  “Hey Bro,” Robert said, finding his voice. “What the hell?”

  “What the hell,” Henry echoed.

  “You want me to put two and two together?” Robert looked at the sky, looked at the ground, taking the time to do the math, struggling to catch up. And then he faced his brother. “Well shit, Henry, looks like that equals four. You went looking for the source right after we found the rock. Right? And you found it. You found this place. You spent a couple of weeks at it. And then three days ago you went home and left me a note and half the rock and then you took off again. You left me clues and expected me to follow.”

  “You followed,” Henry said.

  “Damn straight I did.”

  “You found me.”

  “How could I miss? I read you loud and clear. Found the bandana on the hike in. Smelled the mountain misery—you build a little campfire up top? I assume kicking the rocks over the edge was an accident. And then down in the pit, I found the dime. I played it out. And then that flask in the river. I understand. It’s all cool, Henry. I’m here now. I’m listening to you.”

  “And I’m listening to you,” Henry said.

  I thought, this is isn’t going anywhere good.

  “Why didn’t you just talk to me, Henry? That day in Dad’s attic. We could have talked.”

  “No we could not.”

  “Meaning what? We need to play games to talk?”

  “That’s how we roll.”

  Robert gave a short laugh, a bark. “Where’d you pick up that phrase?”

  “From the movies.”

  “It’s a little cliched. I wouldn’t use it if I were you.”

  “How should I talk, R?”

  “R?”

  “You call me Bro, I call you R. It’s cool.”

  “You’re playing games with my head, Henry.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what’s this game called? Bro.”

  “It needs a name.”

  “How about brothers?” Robert said.

  “That’s good.”

  “How does it start?”

  “You apologize.”

  ‘No problem,” Robert said. “I apologize.”

  “Do you know for what?”

  Robert said, “For whatever I did to offend you.”

  Henry’s hands began to shake. He shook out his arms, gun bobbing in his clenched fists like a jackhammer. He pressed his hands back onto his knees and steadied himself. Steadied the gun. He repeated, “Do you know for what?”

  “I just said I…” Robert lifted his own hands, spread them wide. “Sure, I know. For being a bully of a big brother. All the times I put you down.”

  “That’s when we were kids.”

  “I don’t recall being a shithead to you as an adult.”

  “Do you know for what?”

  Robert said softly, “Not just being a bully. Enabling you to mess around with the mercury. I’m truly sorry Henry.”

  “That’s when we were kids.”

  Robert blinked. “Then I don’t know what you want me to apologize for.”

  “Think.”

  “If I was a shithead as an adult, I apologize for that too. We good?”

  Henry didn’t answer.

  “Henry,” I blurted, “
your brother came to us to help you.”

  Henry turned to me. “Thank you Cathy.”

  And then he looked beyond me, beyond us all, to the hillside that bordered the mine works canyon.

  17

  I looked where Henry was looking. Thinking, what’s over there?

  I’d come down that way, following the sluiceway path down the slim canyon from the mine works—albeit on the opposite side of the sluiceway. Seems that canyon now deserved a name. Sluiceway Canyon. Up top, I’d found the hornfels. Down here, in Notch Valley, the hillside met the high southern wall that caged the valley and rose to a ridge far up above.

  I stared hard but could discern nothing remarkable about that hillside.

  Henry stood and, with his gun, urged us to stand.

  It seemed we were going to find out what was over there.

  He steered us to the bottom of the sluiceway where the climb upcanyon began. This was the side without an established path, and the ground was rough. We carefully hiked a short distance and then Henry turned us to walk toward the hillside. We halted just short of it. The footing was uneven, the slope gradient noticeable.

  We stood in a line, ducks in a row, me at the uphill end, Henry at the downhill end, with a fine position in which to cover us with his gun.

  I examined the hillside. Now that I was facing it straight-on, I saw that its gravelly face appeared to have been eroded, perhaps by a hidden spring, some long-ago finger of flowing water. Indeed, a shallow trough ran out of the cavity and cut the slope between Walter and Robert. The cavity itself looked to be about twenty feet deep and twenty wide and ran a good twenty feet high. It was nearly overgrown by vegetation. It looked like a grotto. It looked like a good place to hide.

  It looked, actually, like the miners had claimed it as a storage space. Old timber was piled in there, castoffs from the sluiceway.

  Robert spoke. “Got a pile of dimes in there, Henry?”

  “No.”

  I shifted. What, then? Not certain I wanted to know.

  “It’s under that… That…” Henry frowned.

  “Bracken,” Walter said.

  “Bracken,” Henry repeated.