A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  Grant took the jogging path over the dam and skirted the far edge of the Evergreen Public Golf Course, Colorado’s first mountain golf course, carved in 1925 out of the former ranch of pioneer cattle rustler Julius C. Dedisse, who, when he willed the mountain park to the City of Denver and named it Eden, possibly intended it to be a 420-acre utopian clothing-free zone, but Denver had more modest plans. The City built the thirty-foot dam on the frisky flooding Bear Creek, creating the lake that ate the golf balls of all future unsuspecting golfers who, unfamiliar with high-altitude and rock-hard fairways, hit straight and long between the fairway bunkers, as any sane player would, and watched their tee shots carom crazily off the hardpan fescue, and, in never more than two or three spectacular bounces, plop into the lake short of the bunkers. Lee and Grant had done a brisk business with a borrowed canoe and a couple of telescoping ball-retrieval implements one summer until the club pro chased them off.

  Grant quickly found the hiking trail that had once connected course and lake and Dedisse Park to the self-proclaimed Gem of the Rockies, Troutdale-in-the-Pines. A four-story, lichen-rock–covered, three-hundred-room resort hotel on a beautiful bend in Bear Creek Canyon, Troutdale was, when Lee and Grant were growing up, the site of so many battles and skirmishes and trespasses and betrayals, they considered it their personal playground. Shut down and abandoned in 1961, locked in endless litigation and grand plans for reopening as an executive retreat or a drug rehabilitation center (depending on the county meeting you might have attended), Troutdale-in-the-Pines was their clubhouse in the summer, haunted all fall, an icy fortress in the winter, and Camelot Castle in the spring. They couldn’t get to school without passing it. Their parents forbade them from going in it, but were, not surprisingly, helpless to prevent them from doing so. There was supposed to be a security presence on-site, but that would have been Sheriff Edgerly, the former Clear Creek County lawman whose fondness for fruity liquor got him un-elected and prematurely retired, and ultimately prevented him from operating a motor vehicle, which, contractually, he would have needed to get from his double-wide in Conifer to Troutdale in order to fulfill his responsibilities as court-appointed caretaker of the property. The boys were on their own, free to search for artifacts of the dignitaries and celebrities who had supposedly stayed there in its heyday: Herbert Hoover and William Jennings Bryant, Esther Williams, Ty Cobb, Lillian Gish and Groucho Marx and Lionel Barrymore; free to invent wild tales that the hotel was haunted in order to keep other kids away; free to get drunk on 3.2 beers and piss out the windows; free to make war with each other, room to room, with broomsticks and Tony the Tiger Styrofoam antennae balls and, later, Airsoft guns and frozen snowballs. It was in the ballroom of Troutdale-in-the-Pines that Grant first got laid, on a cushion of parkas, by a limber, enthusiastic Marion Gilroy, not the backseat of the Plymouth, as he later told Lee, which was the opening salvo of their civil war. Grant had, for some sentimental reason, wanted to spare the hotel from becoming their Fort Sumpter; now, coming out of the trees, he was confronted by the half-completed, riverside housing development, Troutdale Estates, and while Grant remembered everything about the old resort, all the adventures, all the mistakes, he felt no sense of its loss. Burned down by vagrants, demolished, graded, and subdivided, of the hotel only the hand-built stone retaining wall along one arc of the river remained. New asphalt curled through the trees linking fat, two-story, neo-eclectic homes with detached garages and dryscaped lots of sustainable native plants and postal boxes on rough-hewn cedar posts.

  In the driveway of a hillside home, a slender, striking woman in her mid-thirties struggled to put a baby into a car seat in the back of her new white Hyundai minivan while keeping her just-past-its-sell-by-date coiffure from getting smushed by the sliding door. Successful, she disappeared into the house and returned with a Swedish jogging stroller that she folded up and threw in the back of the car.

  Across the street and down the hill, Grant stood motionless, watching her, with a slightly confounded expression on his face. Just watched as the young woman slammed the car doors shut, got behind the wheel, and fired up the V6. The Korean car burned a little oil. She backed out of the driveway and drove past Grant. He turned his back to the street and looked, his hands jammed contemplatively in his jeans pockets, as if there was something really interesting about the unsold house in front of which he was standing.

  After it had passed him, Grant turned again and watched the white car until it disappeared around a curve. For the next several moments it seemed to flutter through the trees, appearing, disappearing, appearing, dappled with light like a memory he was trying to recall. Or forget. Then it was gone altogether and Grant picked up his nylon duffle and returned through the pine forest in the direction he had come.

  Redolent with a pesky afterburn of patchouli from Dr. Harounian’s eau de cologne, the Evergreen High School teachers’ lounge was also suspiciously silent when Lee walked in to refresh his coffee. Three or four teachers were scattered around the big table trying to A) ignore the donut tray, and B) create sufficient distance between themselves and Harounian (Spanish I, II, III, and seventh grade Health), who was reading the morning paper and grading tests. The coffee smelled like burned cinnamon, which meant that Mrs. Coslet (Civics and Pep Squad) had reimposed her will on the Bunn-o-Matic. But caffeine was caffeine, and Lee was refilled and shaking the Coffee Mate into his cup when there was a rustling of papers behind him, the squeaking of a chair, and “How’s that gold mine, Mr. Garrison?”

  Lee turned. Vandenberg (AP Bio, Botany, and Intro to Earth Science) grinned back at him in a friendly way that was, for Vandenberg, insanely out of character.

  “Terrific, Mr. V.,” Lee said. “Fantastic.”

  Vandenberg just smiled and nodded like a bobblehead. Lee took his coffee cup and walked out. From the hallway, after the door closed behind him, Lee could hear everyone back in the lounge burst into laughter about something.

  He didn’t break stride.

  Automotive class was a block period, almost two full hours, an elective that in many districts had been eliminated due to lack of funding, but Evergreen was flush with tax base from those upscale Denver expat commuters, who demanded a lively and varied curriculum for their gifted children, most of whom, despite sterling transcripts, would choose to stay in Colorado and wind up in middle management at a data storage or telecommunications company. Nobody seemed to mind that the future of the internal combustion engine was murky, at best, or that none of the kids crowded around Lee—worrying over the engine of a Dodge Ram truck chassis that had wheels and transmission and steering wheel and seat and no body whatsoever—would likely ever look under the hood of their cars after high school. There were fourteen boys and one girl. Lee also taught physics, but it was the practical classes, auto and wood shop, that made his day.

  “The action of the pistons accomplishes two things: On the downstroke, it pulls the fuel into the firing chamber; on the upstroke, it brings oil from below to lubricate the cylinder, at the same time compressing the fuel mixed with oxygen, which is ignited by the spark, causing an explosion that drives the piston back down into the cylinder and results in what?” Lee asked.

  No one spoke up. At least four students were texting on cell phones, heads down, hands pulled in. Lee’s laissez-faire classroom policy toward personal peripherals and new technology was fairly scandalous among his fellow faculty.

  “Something good on YouTube, Gary?”

  One of the texters looked up, but not guiltily.

  “Anybody?”

  “Torque.”

  Lee knew the voice, but was momentarily disoriented by it. Not a student. Not a teacher, unless Biederman was disguising his Chicago-born Northern Cities Vowel Shift. The voice came from behind him. That Biederman knew anything about torque was questionable. Lee turned: Grant, in the doorway.

  “Torque. That could be right,” Lee said.

  “Nothing moves without torque.” Grant crossed and Lee got up and the brothers
embraced in an embarrassing bear hug.

  “You aren’t supposed to be out for another three months.”

  “I was rewarded for extremely good behavior.”

  “You should have called me.”

  “Why? You know I like busses.” Grant became aware of the class, gaping at them. “What are you little pissholes looking at?”

  The boys who were snickering suddenly fell silent. The lone female, a gender-confused six-footer who called herself Dotty, blushed. The classroom smelled of cedar and pine and petroleum oils. There was a huge, unfinished wooden cross splayed out on sawhorses in the back of the shop. Grant knew better than to ask about it.

  “We’re brothers,” Grant explained, finally. Then he hauled off and kissed Lee full on the mouth, startling everybody, including Lee.

  “Or at least that’s our story,” Grant added.

  ELEVEN

  Lee’s house, the house they both grew up in, was a Colorado ranch-style, the comfort food of Rocky Mountain residential architecture: L-shaped, cross-gabled, and unpretentiously trimmed in redwood-stained cedar. Its thick eyebrows of rambling, overhanging eaves sheltered dark thermopane windows bracketed by faux shutters and little concrete patios jutting out from sliding doors everywhere. A steep roof of fire-resistant cedar shake shingles stepped down smartly to the requisite three-car garage. Once it had been the center of their universe, but, after their parents were killed by a drunk driver on U.S. 285 and Lee came back from college to live with Grant as he finished high school, whatever gravity had kept them in its orbit was gone. The house needed new gutters, fresh paint, and purpose. It was a book with the pages ripped out. A shell washed up by yesterday’s storm.

  An over-easy sun was settling in the crook of Mount Evans as Lee’s Jeep pulled into the driveway. Lee got out, carrying bags of takeout Cowboy Ming Chinese food and talking nonstop:

  “The main shaft goes eight hundred feet into the mountain, and there are two branch shafts that go a hundred and twenty-two respectively, left and right, plus a downsloping shaft that’s filled with water, but we sunk a fifty-foot line down it and couldn’t touch bottom.”

  Grant dragged his single suitcase out of the back of the Jeep and glanced at the suppositorial bumps and long shadows of Lee’s side lawn septic-tank installation (reminiscent of “Cadillac Ranch,” a.k.a. Carhenge, the Ant Farm Art Collective’s Amarillo planting of ten nose-down, half-buried cars in the Texas flatlands at angles supposedly corresponding to the Great Pyramid of Giza, although Grant was fairly certain Lee had no knowledge of it when he installed the things) before hurrying up the steps after his brother.

  “Of course, we didn’t go all the way in since we’re still shoring up the main timbers; we used Doug’s laser level to guesstimate the distances. It could be that the branch shafts take a hard turn deeper in, in which case there’s no telling how far they go.”

  Lee stood in the middle of the empty living room, where two folding aluminum lawn chairs comprised the furniture, and faced a tiny flat-screen TV resting uncertainly on its own upended cardboard box. Grant hadn’t seen his brother so excited about anything in a long time.

  “And as for the downshaft, again according to Doug, they didn’t go down unless there was something really valuable to be had below because of the, you know, considerable difficulty of bringing the ore up.”

  “The fuck is this Doug?”

  “What?”

  “Doug.”

  “Oh, he’s—”

  “Maybe we should eat in the kitchen.”

  “Ideally you’d slot another, lower shaft on an angle in from the mountain, of course, so you didn’t undermine your primary ingress.”

  “Lee.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We gonna eat the Chinese or what?”

  “Yeah. Lemme just . . . ” Lee put the bags down and went into the kitchen, where he made a lot of noise, and returned with five mutant chopsticks evidently crossbred with sporks.

  “In case one breaks,” Grant observed.

  “What?”

  “Lee.”

  “What?”

  “I’m out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t believe I’m out.”

  “I know. Me neither.”

  “Your haircut’s for shit.”

  “I know.”

  “You still going to Shorty? He’s blind.”

  “I know. But he hasn’t raised his prices in twenty years.”

  “Because he’s blind.”

  “True.” Lee tugged at the unruly nest on his forehead with resignation. Grant just grinned at him fondly.

  “So who is this Doug?”

  Lee had piles of photographs of the mine, five-by-seven color snapshots, plus hundreds of jpegs on his laptop that he could put in slide-show mode to pop music that Grant didn’t recognize. Lee found a snapsnot of himself, Doug, and Mayor Barb, badly framed, standing, smiling, next to the entrance to the Blue Lark. Their legs were comically dripped in incandescent mustard mud. Lee thumbed the grinning image of Doug Deere, whose right hip and love handles were sliced off by the edge of the picture:

  “He’s the Clear Creek County Clerk.”

  “And then some. And who’s the pony keg?”

  They stood in the kitchen and ate Kung Pao chicken at the counter with Cowboy Ming chop-sporks while the jpegs faded one into the next on the luminous laptop screen. There was, Grant had noticed immediately, no refrigerator in the kitchen, just the space where one should be. That was going to be one of his next questions, but he wanted to let his brother’s batteries run down a bit further.

  “That’s Mayor Barb.”

  “Holy bull dyke, Batman.”

  “Cut it out. She’s not. And anybody ever point out you’re a homophobe?”

  “You. And I probably am. What’s your point?”

  “She’s just—”

  “Manly?”

  “Astray.”

  “A stray.”

  “No. Astray. Off course. Amiss. She’s mayor and the law and the sole postal person of Basso Profundo and she hawks Amway, in case you need some vitamins or cleaning products. It turns out I’m out-of-bounds EPA-wise with a variety of toxic effluents as a consequence of my opening the mine, so it’s actually pretty fortuitous for me to have her on the team.”

  “Yeah, and, so, about your ‘team’ . . . ”

  “But I should caution you,” Lee continued, cutting his brother off, “sometimes Barb talks of multiple ex-husband chicanery and the distinct possibility of disowned progeny, so you’ll need to really watch your mouth with her, Grant, or she might shoot your balls off and mount them over her fireplace.”

  Grant smiled. “Next to yours?”

  “I think mine are over a different fireplace.”

  Grant nodded, thoughtful. “Basso what?”

  “Profundo.”

  “Oh bro. That shitty little would-be ghost town up toward Keystone? I hate that place.”

  “Well it’s beautiful, up above.”

  “In an oxygen-deprived kinda way. Lee, if we strip away the romance, you know, your usual dreamy shroud of idealistic I-don’t-know-what, and cut to the chase, as they say, whoever they are: Is there gold in this mine or what?”

  Lee put the snapshot of Barb back in a different pile than the one he took it from and resumed showing Grant another pile of more scholarly studies of the mine proper.

  “This one’s from inside.”

  “Lee.”

  “We rigged up low-voltage lights down the main tunnel to where it branches out.”

  “Lee. I hate it when you go all parallel.”

  Lee opened a kitchen cabinet and reached among the books stored there for an old U.S. Geological handbook with mining claim surveys in it.

  “According to the School of Mines survey, it’s a drift mine, which means it goes straight into the side of the mountain rather than vertically down, with tunnels branching horizontally off from the downshaft. Although there is a downshaft inside my min
e, but that’s another story, and it’s still a drift mine because of the straight-in egress.” Grant yawned. “Anyway,” Lee continued, “it’s smallish, for a drift mine, as if they just got started, which is exciting because it could mean it never played out. There are three principal shafts and one that caved in, right here. Now, USGS says the mine is silver, zinc, and lead. But this old geologist who hiked up there told me the tailings are gold mine tailings, and Doug says a lot of times the old miners would fudge their yield reports to conceal the fact they were sitting on gold. I mean, you’d be amazed, man, these guys were always lying about yields, about locations, about assays.”

  “Dog eat dog,” Grant said.

  “Exactamente.”

  “Or Doug eat dog, from the looks of him.” Grant waited for Lee to laugh, which he didn’t. “So we’re talking how much in potential value?”

  Lee clammed up.

  “You thought I’d forgotten my original question.”

  “No.”

  “Is there any precious metal in the mine?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point.”

  “Mmm. What is the point?”

  Lee took a deep breath, held it, exhaled.

  “I’m not judging,” Grant said. “I swear. I need to know.”