A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  “And then the godparents will recite their oath,” the pastor said, “yada yada, then you’ll give me the baby, and I’ll ask Duncan to come with me to the font . . . ”

  “No.”

  The boy twisted away from the pastor and dodged his mom’s outstretched arms.

  “Duncan!” Dad slid laterally to cut off the escape route through the pews, so the boy reversed field, leapt up onto the altar, and climbed Lee’s ladder until he was, literally, climbing Lee.

  “Whoa, whoa—” For a moment, Lee had all he could handle juggling the clear coat and brush while remaining relatively quiet as the boy monkey-scrambled over him and perched at the very top of the ladder, looking down smugly as if Lee would protect him.

  “I’m so sorry,” Duncan’s dad called up to Lee in a civil voice, and then, in thundered impotence, “Duncan, you come down here right now!”

  The boy, of course, didn’t move. His eyes were narrowed and feral. The Golden Child was mewling. Everybody was looking up at Duncan who was looking plaintively down at Lee. As if asking: What are you gonna do about it?

  “Lee,” the pastor said.

  “Sir,” the dad said, “if you could just . . . ”

  “I’M NEVER COMING DOWN!” Duncan announced.

  Duncan’s mom trembled, pale. Duncan’s dad flushed a purple rage. The breeze picked up, tugged at the open doors.

  “Lee?”

  “Don’t make me come up there!”

  Out front, in the outdoor ashtray at the bottom of the chapel steps, a stubbed-out cigar smoldered. Grant had watched the front half of this family melodrama and then had gone to the car and was waiting there, not wanting to witness what he guessed would probably just be another one of Lee’s fucking miracles of patience and dependability.

  Lee looked up at the boy. The ladder wobbled; Duncan’s dad had begun to climb it.

  “Whoawhoawhoa, mister, don’t do that!” Lee said.

  “Get him down then.”

  “Well, yeah, all right, but alive would be good,” Lee said. “This ladder won’t hold all three of us.”

  “Duncan,” the dad brayed, ignoring Lee, “get down here, or else!”

  Yeah, that’ll do it, Lee thought.

  The little boy started howler monkey shrieking, and his dad shouted back at him: “Shut up shut up shut up” in a loop. Pastor John closed his eyes. Duncan’s mother was sobbing.

  “Hey.” Lee used his teacher voice.

  The shrieking ceased, and the boy gazed coolly down at Lee like, hey, it wasn’t him who’d been making all that racket. His eyes dropped to a careful half-mast.

  “You remind me of my little brother.”

  The boy made a snarky grunting sound, and Lee climbed up to him faster than the boy thought was possible for a man with a brush and a paint can. He gripped the ladder tightly, though. Not coming down.

  “This is something he would do,” Lee said, close, low, confidential, and a little scary underneath because, well, teachers know how to make you squirm. “My brother. Just to fuck with me. Is that what this is?”

  The boy stared at him, worried now, eyes wide, even though Lee’s tone was pleasant and his face serene.

  “Here,” Lee said to the boy, and he held out the can of clear coat. “Can you hold this for a sec?”

  Lee’s eyes were open and earnest, and so, completely confused, the boy took the can.

  “Thanks. And this,” Lee said, holding out the brush.

  The boy took it, hooking his arm through a rung of the ladder because now his hands were full.

  “Okay. So, as long as you’re up here and not coming down,” Lee said in that low, quiet, expressively agreeable voice, “why don’t you just go ahead and you fucking finish painting the cross because I’m out.”

  And then Lee climbed down.

  Duncan’s dad was hissing, “What are you doing, what the heck are you doing, mister?” But Lee just slipped past him, silent, and walked out of the church.

  And Duncan’s dad looked up the long ladder at his son.

  And Duncan’s mom blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

  And Duncan’s will deserted him.

  And Pastor John Leonard—it just got the better of him; Pastor John prayed that his new cross wouldn’t be ruined.

  An argent lure sliced through the air, scattering sunlight as it spun and arced and clattered loudly into a tin bucket in the unmowed grass. Through her store window, Rayna watched Mayor Barb give a jerk to the fishing rod she held loosely in her hand to make the lure dance back out of the bucket, and then she swiftly reeled in the twenty yards of six-pound test Rayna had sold her last week. A Subaru powered up Main Street doing about fifty and fishtailing. Barb scowled until she recognized Doug’s car. He skidded into the dry gully where a gutter would be, climbed from his car, walked straight to Barb, and squeaked, “It’s gold. Barb, it’s gold.”

  “What?”

  “The assay.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Then Doug and Mayor Barb were dancing like dervishes, her spinning rod whipping its quicksilver lure around their heads insanely. From inside the grocery store, though, Rayna could only make out the sharp, incoherent consonants and the ends of Doug’s exclamations.

  “Excuse me? Miss?” A throat cleared.

  Rayna turned away from the window, to her cash register, and rang up a six-pack of cherry cola for a customer in a straw hat. By the time she turned back to look out the window again, Barb and Doug were riding up the hillside and into the trees on Barb’s unhappy mare.

  “You should have left that pissant ankle biter up there on the ladder.”

  Lee and Grant were hunkered down near the broken Blue Lark mine buildings, directly below and just slightly left, or south, of the mine itself. Lee sat on his haunches, staring at a hollow, sapling-studded depression in the mountain slope directly ahead of him. Grant was behind him, bent over, like a caddie helping a golfer read a green, busting his brother for what he assumed had happened in the church with the little prick.

  “You see it?” Lee asked.

  “The Darwinian solution,” Grant continued.

  “You see it?” Lee was ignoring him.

  “No.” Grant yawned. If he’d been more interested he would have been bored. “Another dozen years,” he observed, continuing his rant, “and you’ll have that little shit in a chem lab or something and he’ll blow somebody the fuck up. I mean. Last thing we need is more useless clutter in the evolutionary pool,” he added, though he didn’t really believe it. “But no,” Grant said, “you had to save him. Am I right? My brother the saint.”

  Lee ignored him and pointed. “Parallel ridges,” he said. “Right there. The ghost of some mine cart tracks.” Grant struggled to see what Lee saw: the faint suggestion of raised bands that extended from where Lee had positioned himself, running straight into the bottom of the rocky hillside hollow.

  Grant frowned. “Another mine?”

  Doug’s strangled voice came up from the trees: “LEE!”

  Lee ignored it. “No. A second egress,” he said. “A later attempt to bore into a vertical vein they may have found the tail of up above.”

  “LEE!?”

  Lee stood then, and he and Grant watched Doug and Mayor Barb emerge sideways from the forest on Mayor Barb’s breathless and complaining and considerably overloaded horse.

  “WE DID IT! WE GOT IT! WOO! WOO-HOO!!”

  As if he didn’t hear them, Lee looked at the hillside again and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Could be we’ve found a way to drain that downshaft,” he said.

  “GOLD! WE FOUND GOLD!”

  Grant couldn’t take his eyes off them; he watched as they arrived, ungainly, and the horse literally groaned. Grant looked from Doug and Barb arriving and then to Lee not even reacting to them, to their won-the-lottery, big shit-eating grins that Grant didn’t much like but was about to let form on his own face, ready to let out a celebratory whoop with Doug and Barb, but Lee,
his brother Lee, had no reaction at all.

  “Lee?”

  Lee wouldn’t look at him. Barb’s mare clopped around like an Irish clog dancer, and Barb hopped off and led it the rest of the way up the slope, and then tried to help Doug dismount the poor animal, as Doug whooped, hoarse: “WE’RE RICH!”

  So Grant yelled too—WHOOPED—but there was nothing behind it. It was just loud noise trying to find a reason.

  “Assay shows gold in the mine, Lee,” Barb said, breathless. “Doug picked the report up this morning. A considerable effing amount of gold, too, if Doug got the numbers right.” Then, to Doug: “Careful getting down, cowboy, careful.”

  “Yeah, like I’m not gonna be.” Doug fussed, “Is my foot in the stirrup?”

  “Which part of the mine?” Lee asked.

  Barb talked about a couple of places in the mine shaft corresponding to samples they had tested. “It’s not like a big vein or anything,” she admitted. “But gold is definitely there, in the rock. And the OPT is encouraging.”

  “It’s our Holy Moses,” Doug crowed. “Creede’s lode.”

  “Creede’s up north,” Grant said, frowning.

  “Don’t get him started,” Barb advised.

  “Not literally,” Doug said. “Lemme just,” Doug stuttered, trying to dismount, “lemme just, lemme just—”

  Lee processed what he’d just heard from them and still had no reaction. None. They might as well have been telling him the time of day. Grant shook his head.

  “What is wrong with you? You did it. We did it.”

  Lee spun away from him as Doug began screaming, “I’M STUCK! MY FOOT’S STUCK!”

  Sure enough, Doug’s double-E boot was jammed in the stirrup and the horse was moving again. Doug hopped. Barb tried to grab the reins. Lee turned his attention back to the slope of the mountain and seemed to settle on an excavation strategy.

  “We could bring the backhoe down here,” he mused, “and dig that thing out. This mine might be even bigger.”

  “The GOLD,” Doug barked, still hopping, “the GOLD . . . the GOLD is IN the mine we GOT—we don’t need to dig another foot, time for the big boys to bring their toys—”

  “We should try and control the effluent this time, though, huh?” Lee was talking to Barb but not looking at her. Grant wanted to scream. He walked away. Doug finally fell over onto the ground; his foot was still hung up in the stirrup, but the horse quickly lost interest in dragging him, so Doug rolled over on his back and waved his arms.

  “Could somebody give me a hand here?”

  Grant scudded down the tailings away from them, stormy, down into the trees, his shoulders round, his head low. Lee could tell that his brother was mad at him, but he wondered if he should care.

  “Lee.” Barb put her hand on his shoulder and repositioned him so he had to look at her. She said: “Lee, honey, we’ve struck gold. Could you just stop for one second and get a pulse and, gosh, I don’t know, savor the effing moment or something?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Pyrotechnic sparks cartwheeled from one explosion into other, smaller explosions blossoming red, white, and blue, and a fiery glitter cascading down onto a three-masted Yankee Clipper ship. Old Ironsides?

  The crowd: “Ooooo. Ahhhhh.”

  Fireworks splayed majestically against an indigo sky.

  Another concussion that, oddly, made no sound. A spray of pink-ribboned needles of fire and the collective intake of spectators’ breaths and the lake crickets ululating and the glistening reflection off the water and the murmuring of the voices, and more skyrockets flashed, but with no report. Majestic fireworks from New York City, broadcast wirelessly on a delayed satellite feed to several big-screen TVs scaffolded variously on the manicured lakeside fairway, near the bunkers, and decorated with fluttering festive crepe paper streamers.

  “The proof is in the pudding,” Beachum lectured to a captive audience, “they know how to celebrate our country’s birthday back East. Don’t they pull out all the stops? No state laws prohibiting the use-or-sale nonsense . . . ” He sat beside Lorraine and the baby on a plaid picnic blanket among a patchwork of other families on other blankets watching the video fireworks and eating off paper plates.

  “ . . . if you think about it, our forefathers fought a revolution to get away from rules and regs, and look at us now, so messed up we can’t even set off a Ladyfinger. Nanny State at its absolute worst. Where are we, Sweden? Fireworks are our American legacy—rockets, red glare, bursting, they’re in our marrow. Truly.”

  When some wise guy pointed out that fireworks were Chinese, that just got Beachum going again. Down by the lake, a giant-size barbecue flamed up in the weedy rough, where meat was being seared, corn baked, sausage roasted, and Lee’s forearms dehaired and toasted every time he tried to turn something on the grill with the wimpy tongs someone had provided him. A long line of buffet diners snaked past him, patient, the idle shout-outs of his neighbors floating on the darkness, disembodied from their faces.

  “Hey there, Lee, I hear your gold mine came through.”

  “Yes it did,” he said, rote.

  “Hit the jackpot. Tapped into the mother lode. Wrangled the Big Miyuma. Gooooold-fingah . . . ” Vandenberg’s fat face, leering.

  “You want a strip steak or the turkey sausage?” Lee asked the bio teacher, forcing a smile.

  “Time to talk about your tithe, brother Lee.” This was the other, older pastor. Not John. What was his name?

  “I don’t go to church. I just made the one cross—”

  “Jesus was a carpenter.”

  “—as a favor . . . ”

  “Pick me a winner, Goldfinger.” Vandenberg had circled back.

  Lee stabbed a sausage. “Turkey. There you go.”

  “Hey. Goldfinger! Rock and rollllll!” Now Harounian, the Spanish teacher, had picked up the 007 thread.

  Jesus. “That’s witty,” Lee said, still rote.

  “Tapped into the mother lode. La veta de la madre.”

  “Sausage or steak, H-man?”

  “I guess you ain’t gonna keep teaching.”

  A tall kid loped past with a football, his voice cracking, “Mr. G.! Dude. Minerfortyniner! Tight. Fuckin’ A, man. Fuckin’ A!”

  And then Lorraine, Lorraine was in front of him, looking right at him, into him, holding her baby in one arm, her squirming toddler in the unisex jumper not so much a baby anymore, and a drooping paper plate with potato salad and baked beans in the other.

  “Hi.”

  “Sauce or steakage?” Lee asked her, scrambled.

  “What?”

  “I mean steak. Steak or sausage.”

  “Where’s Grant?”

  Lee didn’t know. Grant took a drive somewhere; he had left early that morning. “Steak or sausage?”

  “Both. There’s two of us,” she said. “We’re sharing a plate.”

  At first, he didn’t understand what she was talking about. Something happened to his head when Lorraine was around; he got all thick and sodden, his thoughts slowed, stupid, dull, and derailed. Sorting it out: two of them, Lorraine and the baby, oh. Lee looked away from her, down, concentrated on the red-hot grill as he deliberately stabbed first a sausage, then a big slab of sizzling beef, and held them up, but Lorraine was gone.

  “We were all so worried about you, Lee.” Another woman’s face was there instead, with pale, fat Botox lips smeared with gloss, purple eye shadow, hair piled up and permed like Miss America in, oh, 1983. He thought he should know her.

  “Steak or sausage?”

  Faces, smiling, kind, convivial, filed past in a blur. Mouths all moving. In the glow of the grill, parents, neighbors, students, strangers. Nothing. Tongues. He didn’t speak this language. A bright, key-groping burst of trumpets and trombones as the high school band began to play what must have been a Sousa march, up on the grassy berm behind the green. All the cool wind from the canyon came up off the still water of the lake. And in the lake’s shallows, a bunch of little
kids stood in knee-deep water waiting, with dour Earl Dollar, the Fire Marshal, hovering grimly nearby holding a silver extinguisher. Lee came down from the barbecue pit with a glowing stick of punk. He trudged out into the water to the waiting kids, pulled two dozen sparklers from his back pocket, and began to light and distribute them.

  “Technically you’re still in violation,” Earl said.

  The sparklers cast their magical, rippling diamond light across the lake. Lee splashed back up onshore, his pants soaked and dripping, his shoes full of silt.

  “Write me a ticket. Earl, we go through this drill every year.”

  “Hey. It’s not the money from the fines; it’s the principle, F.Y.I. But? Am I looking the other way? Yes. I’m looking the other way; don’t blow a gasket.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Lee?”

  Lee jumped, startled by Beachum, who was suddenly behind him in the darkness. And Beachum jumped backward, startled by Lee’s jumping.

  “Sorry.”

  “No—it’s okay.”

  The Slocumbs were behind Beachum, eating Klondike bars and apple pie from Styrofoam bowls. “You meet the Slocumb brothers? Saul and Paul?”

  Lee admitted that he had.

  “Good fortune, sir! Congratulations are in order!” the twins said, variously. Lee couldn’t remember which was which.

  “Ditto from me, but I already said that,” said Beachum and advised, in a stage whisper to the Slocumbs, “just don’t call him Goldfinger.”

  Saul Slocumb promised that he wouldn’t. “I might add,” he said, “and this will not certainly surprise you, that consequently our interest in your claim is, more than ever before, now truly piqued.”

  Lee only wanted to know how they found out.

  “Gold speaks. Screams, in fact,” Paul said. Lee glanced suspiciously at Beachum.

  “Now, Lee, I tend to keep close counsel with my financial advice, but as I am aware of your current debt situation, let me just offer you some friendly—”

  “What current debt situation?” And, to the Slocumbs, in case they had any doubts, “I’m still not selling. I’m sorry. The mine’s not for sale.”

  “Excuse me?”