A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  “Okay. Well. Yes, I guess it would be okay if there was some gold,” Lee admitted.

  “Was that so hard to say?”

  “But it’s not . . . not the goal.” Lee stammered, “I mean, the goal is just the looking. You know what I’m saying? The hunt. To be honest, it will almost be disappointing to actually find anything because then inevitably it will turn into something altogether different. Not what I want. A business venture. You know? A job.”

  Grant said that this sounded like early justification for the possibility of not finding anything. A kind of preemptive rationalization of failure. Lee admitted it might sound that way, but insisted the mine project, as he called it, was part of a larger metaphor of exploration and self-discovery, which, Grant conceded, after pointing out how incredibly lame that sounded, was in Lee’s case, anyway, long overdue and welcome as long as it didn’t lead to ridicule and public humiliation.

  “The septic field is an art installation,” Lee pointed out, defensively.

  “You bought the gold mine on eBay,” Grant said.

  “I don’t care what other people are saying.”

  It was true; Lee never did. Grant thumbed the pictures of Doug and Barb and wondered aloud mordantly if Lee’s putative partners understood that the gold wasn’t the point.

  “They can think what they want to think” was Lee’s answer.

  “Explain to me again why you need a team?”

  “I don’t. No, you’re right. It’s just, like I said, Barb is like insurance, and additionally advantageous, in a civic sense, not to mention kind of lonely and lost, and Doug . . . well, Doug is kind of like a really crappy copy of The Great Gatsby with the cover almost coming off and notes in the margins scribbled by some pretentious ass, but, actually, and you hate to admit this, useful sometimes, so you can’t bring yourself to throw it away, even if you get a first edition for Christmas.”

  But Grant was more interested in another photograph, one that caught his eye when Lee shuffled past it. He took the stack from Lee and found it again.

  “Who’s this?”

  Lee looked. “Oh,” he said. “That’s Rayna,” he said. Then Lee continued, his finger drawing imaginary lines of intersect on the USGS map book, “So anyway my theory is that the gold, or silver, or whatever, was here, where it all caved in, which means we just have to dig laterally from here . . . to here. And we’ll find it.”

  Grant wasn’t listening. He studied the photograph of the young woman in front of the General Store. Shorts and a T-shirt. Lovely. Casting her disapproving eye and tilted smile at Lee and Doug in their Halloweenish mining getups.

  “Maybe Rayna’s the gold mine.”

  Lee stopped talking and looked at his brother and took the photo away and slipped it carefully back into the stack of snapshots in his hand.

  “Local girl, Grant. Not your type.”

  “No?”

  “Nope.”

  Grant considered himself a pretty good student of Lee’s inflection and intonation, which rarely corresponded directly to his mood, but after years and years of close study, it could be decoded with some confidence, and, taking into account the roughly twenty-one-month absence during which time Lee might conceivably have learned to hide his signals (though Grant doubted it), the statement “not your type” carried a weight and a worry and a forceful possessiveness that Grant had not seen in Lee in, like, forever. Or maybe never.

  It cheered him right up.

  And Grant, being Grant, also took it as a challenge.

  “Check it out.” Lee held up a hideous picture from inside the mine in which the camera flash had essentially turned every surface into a tiny plane of hellfire. “Here’s that vertical downshaft I was talking about. I think what they did was they tried to go down to get back to the gold, which was here.”

  “Is that water?”

  “Yeah, I told you the mine was filled with water.”

  “You think of a mine, you think, I dunno, dry. Dusty. Underground desert.”

  “No, mostly they’re wet.”

  “Huh.”

  Lee held up another photograph. “Here’s looking back to the entrance,” he continued. “See how low that first length of tunnel coming in is?”

  “You talk to Lorraine ever?”

  “What?” Lee glanced expressionlessly at Grant, but failed to convey the intended sense of I-don’t-care.

  “Lorraine. Talk. Do you?”

  “No.” Lee held his brother’s stare evenly. “Why?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Because.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Because it’s been, what, almost two years, and you haven’t even replaced the fucking fridge.”

  “I don’t cook much.”

  “You don’t cook with a fridge, bro. You put beer in it.”

  Lee changed subjects. “The mine’s in both our names.”

  Grant frowned. “It’s what?”

  “I put the deed to the gold mine in both our names. In case something happens to me, I want you to have it, and in case we actually find something, I want you to have half.”

  “What would happen to you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just,” then he stopped. “You know.”

  Silence. The two brothers stared at each other. Grant smiled.

  “What about your team?”

  “We’re just playing around, you know. Being miners. Out in the fresh air.”

  “They’re gonna want a piece of it.”

  “Sure. They work hard; they’re helping. We’ll figure it out if it comes to that.”

  “You didn’t give them shares, did you?”

  “Of the land? No. God no. Just you and me, on the deed.” Grant shook his head. “You’re an idiot.”

  “Yeah, well. It’s in the blood.”

  “Not in my blood.”

  “Our parents were Civil War reenacters,” Lee pointed out to his brother. “So. All bets are pretty much off.”

  “True dat,” Grant laughed.

  “Remember the story about when Mom tried to join the Second Colorado Volunteer Infantry for the battle of Honey Springs down in Oklahoma?”

  Grant couldn’t stop laughing. “As a man.”

  “They didn’t allow women to participate.”

  Still laughing: “Stop.”

  “Before we were born. With the fake mustache,” Lee said, “and a rolled-up sock down her pants and the chest binder that broke when she fell during an ill-fated flanking charge, and this medic rushed over to check for a heartbeat and got a faceful of Mom’s funbag, and Dad got up and coldcocked the guy with the butt of his musket, and then they bolted away and had to hide in a thicket of chokecherry bushes until everybody else went home. Like, ten hours. With all these pissed-off Okie battlefield organizers looking for them.”

  “I take it back,” Grant wheezed. “The gene pool. We are so doomed.”

  “And that was one of their more successful outings,” Lee observed.

  Grant laughed with his brother and felt happy, which felt stupid and weird after not feeling anything for so long. He loved Lee in the most complicated and conflicted way possible, which is to say, in the only way Grant could love anyone. He looked down at the School of Mines survey plat. Concentric free-form lines of elevation, the faint green shading, the numbers, tiny, precise.

  “Here to here?” he said. “Looks easy enough. What’s the big problem?”

  TWELVE

  PROBLEM #1:

  The earsplitting roar of a giant rental jackhammer nearly disemboweled Grant as he and Lee drove the hellish two-man implement into a two-foot depression on one wall of the mine shaft, just past where the main tunnel split into three, spitting sparks and rock chips until Grant yelped in pain and shut it off.

  “MOTHERcocksuckingsonofabitch! Fuck me!”

  He staggered away, spitting grit, brushing hot rock off his bare arms, past where Mayor Barb was standing with a hose.

  “Wash it down!” Lee shouted, gesturing. She opened the nozzle a
nd directed a pulsing stream of water pumped from the bottomless downshaft at the freshly hewn rock.

  Grant continued sloshing out through the viscous mud that still comprised the floor. A string of overhead lights drew a line for him to the bright daylight of the mine entrance. Halfway there, in the low tunnel Grant had dubbed “fucking Cardiff-in-a-Hole,” Doug was bent over, painfully chunk-shouldered, mucking the mud into what looked to be a wheelbarrow from hell, dripping and skim-coated in evil itself. Grant squeezed past him, ripping foam plugs out of his ears.

  “That is torture. No one, no one should voluntarily work one of those fuckers,” Grant said. “No one.”

  He stumbled out of the mine and squinted uncomfortably in the bright sunlight, his eyes screwed up until they adjusted. He turned off his headlight, dropped his helmet on the level ground, and hunched against the shovel of the backhoe, finally going hands on knees, spitting grit again.

  PROBLEM #2:

  Doug soon careened out with his wheelbarrow and dumped the gelatinous Day-Glo mud from the tunnel into a little leeching pond of mine water. He sat heavily on a crate, exhausted, and looked at Grant.

  “They use. Those horizontal hand-jacks at. That molybdenum mine up by Empire. I was told. A miner up there. Can go six feet. In a day. Solo.”

  “Don’t talk when you can’t breathe, Doug.”

  “I’m. Breathing. Fine. Winded. Thin air. Good aerobic.”

  “Jesus. You think this is fun, don’t you?”

  Doug hacked up some sediment and spat it into the leeching pond. “No. I’m dog tired,” Doug admitted. “But. I’m a shareholder, and it’s only fair. Pull my weight. I’ve got to hold up my end.”

  Grant stared at him and palpated a pressure point behind his ears, trying to ward off the cluster headache he could feel coming on.

  “Shareholder? Lee gave you a piece of the mine?”

  “Well, of any output, yes,” Doug insisted. “Ten percent, just like Barb.”

  “Is that your reckoning or is it somewhere in writing?”

  “Well—”

  “Based on what?”

  Doug didn’t like where this conversation was headed, so he started a new one: “Lee says you just got out of jail.”

  “You guys didn’t put up any of the money, did you?”

  “What were you in prison for?”

  “There’s no gold in there,” Grant told the fat man. “I hope you realize that. This is just like the septic tanks. It’s Lee’s new performance art piece. You know. He’s gone all Yoko Ono and shit again.”

  “What?”

  And Grant was about to launch into the story of Lee’s front lawn found-art installation, which he had told many times, when:

  PROBLEM #3:

  Mayor Barb came rushing out of the mine, grinning like a lunatic. “Found some,” she said.

  “No way.”

  Grant: “Whoa, what?”

  “Way.” They both ignored Grant.

  Doug heaved himself up. “Where?”

  “You know that niche above the beams, just past the main intersection?”

  Doug examined the shiny, misshapen nuggets in Barb’s outstretched hand. “Fool’s gold.”

  “It is not.”

  “Iron pyrite. Fool’s gold.”

  “No, look, it’s dull, it’s not shiny, and—”

  Doug scooped the rocks out of her hand and threw them down the mountain.

  “Hey!”

  In his maddeningly homespun and grandiloquent way, Doug proceeded to explain to Barb and Grant, should Grant care to listen in, that mineral pyrite is an iron sulfide with a pale- to normal-brass-yellow hue, sometimes shiny, sometimes not, with the chemical formula of FeS2. The most common of the sulfide minerals, it is often found in quartz veins, sometimes even coupled with small quantities of gold, because gold and arsenic can occur as a coupled substitution in the pyrite structure. It took Doug about forty-six minutes to cover the topic, by the end of which time Grant was ready to take a handful of pyrite and stuff it down the plus-sized County Clerk’s piehole.

  “So there could of been gold in there!” Barb exclaimed.

  “Well, only in Nevada, factually,” Doug said, and was clearly prepared to move on to a larger-scale geological lecture involving Carson City and the eastern slope of the Sierras, but this time Barb cut him off.

  “Eff you, Douglas. And the forklift that delivered you.”

  The argument devolved into insults. Grant’s head felt like it was going to explode. Light fractured, the sky heaved away, and he sat down and let their voices break across him, incomprehensible, and watched the vast forest of slender firs rock and scissor in the wind. His eyes closed. Lurid colors splattered in the resulting darkness, his ears still ringing from the jackhammer. A veil lifted.

  This was the moment Grant decided that he needed to save Lee from the mine.

  “Twenty-two inches!” Lee came out of the mountain carrying the huge jackhammer over his shoulder, exhausted, his face pale with rock dust, and happy as a clam.

  “Almost two feet!” Lee said, lost his balance, and toppled sideways and backward under the weight of the pneumatic drill.

  Only sixty-four more to go, Grant thought.

  The fancy, trailored ATVs parked outside and pulled by dualies belonged to a couple of overweight local men who loitered at the cash register of Rayna’s General Store, chewing the fat. No sign of Rayna, though.

  “Hear he paid about twice market value for it, too,” one of the men snarked, as the bell on the door jingled and Grant came in, shedding mine dust. “And now they’re working it,” the man continued to explain to his incredulous friend, giving Grant the cursory look-over-and-dismissal, “with picks and shovels. He and crazy Barb and this other county payroll moron.”

  Grant went down the chips aisle to the back, pulled a can of Squirt from the rack in the refrigerator, then hesitated when he saw Dr Pepper stocked two racks over. Squirt had tang, but the Doctor was tempting.

  “What is he, some Highland Park hedge fund a-hole who cashed in before the subprime mortgage thing?”

  Equally tempting for Grant was a pint of Mountain Dew MDX. He tried to stay focused on the beverages.

  “No, dude. High school teacher.”

  “No shit. Well, there you go. Those lazy bastards only work nine months a year.”

  “I know.”

  “Public sector union sucks.”

  “True dat,” the paler one rapped. “It’s probably a big kabuki sham he’s cooked up to hook some angel investment money.”

  “Hi.”

  Both local men fell silent as Grant slipped between them and put bottles of Squirt, Dew, and Dr Pepper on the counter. He was smiling. He was Mr. Amiable.

  “I’m Grant.”

  “Hey Grant.” The two local men traded stage-frowns, wondering: Who is this clown?

  Rayna emerged from the back room. “Guys, I can’t find any Red Man. You’ll just have to make do with Copennnnn . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she noticed Grant. There was the faintest shift in her eyes and bearing, as if she were thinking, Oh crap, here we go again.

  “I’m the lazy bastard’s brother,” Grant was telling the two men, but he was watching Rayna.

  The men had fallen very quiet.

  “Just got out of state prison,” he said. “Can’t describe for you how terrific it feels.” Grant kept smiling. The feet of the men shuffled uneasily. Rayna rang up his sodas, trying to will away the faint flush that was on her cheeks. Grant watched her and waited, expecting the usual melt. But Rayna held fast at mildly distracted, and her eyes made no promises.

  Interesting.

  “What were you in for?” The locals looked more than a little worried now: How much had this guy overheard?

  “Bad temper,” Grant said, without turning to them.

  The local men became very still. Rayna counted out change for Grant’s twenty, and put it in his hand, her fingers brushing his. Her skin was cool and dry. Up close her features
were a little lopsided in a way that didn’t bother him. She asked if there was anything else he needed.

  Grant looked at the change, looked up at her, and his mood lifted. Definitely not fool’s gold, he thought, about Rayna.

  “Hi. I’m Lee’s brother. Grant.”

  Rayna had no reaction.

  “Lee Garrison?” Grant added helpfully.

  Still blank.

  “He bought the gold mining claim, up—”

  “Oh. Sure,” Rayna said, as if indifferently, although she probably had already noticed the similarity in their eyes, Grant’s and Lee’s. “He never actually told me his name,” she said casually, like an introduction. “I mean . . . or maybe I, you know, forgot it.”

  “He didn’t tell you his name?” Lee was shy, true, but Grant suddenly sensed major female bullshit at play.

  Rayna put out her hand. “Rayna.”

  “I know. He told me. He remembers your name. Nice to meet you. You’re even prettier than the picture my brother’s got of you.”

  Now Rayna didn’t blush, which contradicted everything Grant had learned about women. Flattery was usually the key to the kingdom. This wrinkle was decidedly new.

  “Is it the Polaroid?” Rayna asked. “I look like the bride of Frankenstein in that Polaroid, so, meh, not really a compliment, is it,” Rayna added. “My skin is a calico gangrene. And my boobs appear out of level, which I’m pretty sure they aren’t, ’cause I see them every day. Unless I’m just blind to it.”

  She likes my brother, Grant thought. She knows his name, she just didn’t want me to know she knew; and it was bullshit that he recognized, but not the same bullshit that he thought he knew. It was new bullshit. Sweeter. How was that possible? And, meanwhile, she’s still processing the far-reaching implication of this new fact that my brother, Lee, who no doubt left her the impression that, as a consequence of his failure to sustain his marriage, he’s committed to a monklike existence through the rest of eternity—my brother has got pictures of her back home that he shows to family.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “What? No.”

  “Oh. I thought I smelled it on you.” Grant shrugged. “Everybody in—” (he caught himself) “everybody where I was staying, recently, you know, smoked . . . and now that I’m away from there, I don’t smell it so much, even in bars, and so when I come across it I’m like some avocationally deprived drug-sniffing dog. Maybe you were around someone. Who smoked. Recently.”