A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The late-night host’s gap-toothed elastic face loomed large and smiley on the sixty-five-inch flat-screen TV mounted above the fireplace in Beachum’s living room. The sound was off, and someone was knocking at the door. Beachum, splayed out and snoring on the floor in front of the sectional sofa, didn’t move. The baby was crying, somewhere deeper in the house, as Lorraine went to the front door and opened it.

  Lee stood outside. It was raining, and he was pretty wet. Lorraine was stunned to see him.

  “I need to talk to Stan.”

  Barb reclined on a pile of pillows, rigid, wired, unable to sleep. Classic Letterman blared from her TV, Rayna slept curled in a big chair under the window, and Grant was on the floor against a wall, between a bookshelf stuffed with Farmer’s Almanacs and a stack of translucent storage bins containing what looked like McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, wondering when he could safely leave, but Barb’s restlessness kept him there.

  “Funny,” Barb said, agitated. “I want a funny one. This isn’t a funny one.” She picked up the remote and muted the sound.

  “There’s old episodes I taped in that cabinet,” she told Grant, so he got up and opened the doors of a waxed pine armoire in the opposite corner and peered in at dozens of aging VHS cassette tapes, haphazardly stacked but all carefully hand-labeled with dates stretching back more than a decade and key words and running times and the single word “DAVE.”

  “I guess nobody tapes things anymore,” Barb said apologetically.

  “They do, they just don’t call it taping,” Grant told her.

  “April 2004 there was a real funny one,” Barb said.

  “Hell, didn’t I warn you not to mess with those curry-eaters?”

  Beachum looked like he still hadn’t fully awakened. His hair on one side of his head had been squashed by sleep, giving him a lopsided, Ronald Reagan mien. Lee sat across from his presumed rival, shivering and drinking tea. He lifted the cup with both hands because his fingers were stiff and cold and scraped and swollen.

  “As a matter of record,” Lee said, “no, you didn’t.”

  “Well. Let’s take stock, Lee. They could have killed you, but didn’t. Which I take to mean we’ve still got some leverage.”

  “I just want a fair price.”

  “These things are a delicate balancing act,” Beachum said, starting to dredge up all the old chestnuts he had squirreled away for a situation like this one. Adrenalin was coursing through him, sending shivery spikes of contradiction skittering through his thawing brain: the impossibility of this sudden detente with Lee abrogated by the promise of a sweet, sweet piece of business in the offing.

  “I want Barbara and Doug to get equal shares,” Lee said, “after we take the cost of the land out, and I want the Slocumbs to pay all fees. Including yours.”

  Lorraine came into the kitchen carrying two empty baby bottles, which she put in the sink and started to wash.

  “You can’t just roll over and give them what they want. They won’t respect you,” Beachum cautioned him.

  “They tried to kill me.”

  “You got their attention, all right.”

  “I don’t care what they think of me,” Lee said.

  “Do you want me to handle this transaction or not?”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone better qualified to negotiate my surrender,” Lee deadpanned. Lorraine shot him a look, but Lee pretended not to notice.

  “Surrender?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Well. I don’t know what the hell-o you’re on about now, Lee, but listen to me,” Beachum lectured him. “Listen. Your problem is you don’t understand business. They kicked the shit out of you to get you to sell. But now you’ve still got to play hardball or they’re gonna feel silly for going to all that trouble.”

  “Whose car is that in the driveway?” Lorraine asked.

  Lee said it was Doug’s.

  “Well there’s no windshield.”

  “Really? Gee, I hadn’t noticed. Guess that explains the bugs in my teeth.”

  He fell so easily back into the old bitter rhythms. Lorraine stared at him, stung and unamused.

  “You gotta let me handle this solo, Lee. I should wrangle with the Slocumbs by myself.”

  “Fine,” Lee told him. He looked at Lorraine again and asked if he could sleep on the sofa. Lorraine said nothing, but her husband was doing all the talking anyway.

  “Sure. Absolutely. Good Lord, that’s right—man, your house.” Beachum turned to Lorraine, and realized that he’d forgotten to tell her. “They burned down Lee’s home.”

  Canned laughter.

  Letterman had his audience in stitches. Letterman was laughing. His guest was laughing. Paul Shaffer was laughing. Mayor Barb was asleep. Grant lifted the TV remote from her hand and pulled the comforter up over her. He put the quilt from the foot of the bed around Rayna and walked out.

  A summer chill had set in the thin air. There were huge black holes in the sky where clouds blocked the stars, and a stillness, no wind, nagged at Grant all the way to his car.

  Lorraine’s house held a softer darkness and a prepossessing smell of her that Lee had never forgotten. On the sofa, covered by a blanket, he rested, wide awake, unable or unwilling to sleep. Somewhere in the house, the baby was crying again.

  He got up, suddenly, and followed the sound up the stairs to the baby’s room, where a streetlight cast fragments of white across the floor and a skeletal mobile danced above the crib. Lee looked down at Lorraine’s cranky child; his big face startled the baby, and it cried even louder.

  “Shhhhh.”

  Not so small anymore. Boy or girl? he wondered; the wispy, short-cut brown hair offered no clues; girl, he decided, and he realized sadly that he didn’t know her name and had never asked.

  Lorraine woke up when the crying stopped, and by the time she came into the room, Lee was in the crib, one leg hanging awkwardly over the lowered side railing, her child lying limp across his chest, quiet and content.

  “Are you going to sing?”

  Startled, Lee turned his head and saw Lorraine in the doorway in a baggy pair of what had to be Beachum’s pajamas and sensed she’d been there, watching him, for a while.

  “It looked like you were about to,” she said.

  “I don’t sing.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why I waited. I couldn’t believe it myself.” She came into the room and stood off to one side, arms folded, as if she was not surprised to find him in the crib at all.

  “When Grant was a baby I remember he cried at night,” Lee said. “And I used to sneak into his room and stare into his crib and try to figure out ways to get rid of him.” He read Lorraine’s look of skepticism. “Not kill him, you know, just . . . make him go away. In a fundamental sense. Never to have existed. Complicated assassination plots involving helium balloons and radio-controlled cars and those model space rockets we used to shoot off into the sky—they had plastic parachutes that melted before the payload opened and never worked. I couldn’t understand why my parents would let him cry like that.”

  “It’s so they can learn to go to sleep by themselves,” Lorraine said. “Your brother still has an issue with that,” she added, mostly to herself.

  The baby stirred and began to squall. It might have been their voices or it might have been baby-dreaming. Lorraine picked her child up as Lee struggled unsuccessfully to extract himself from the crib.

  “The hitch was getting rid of him without Mom and Dad missing him,” Lee said. He had a big wet spot on his shirt from where the little rug rat had sweated through its onesie.

  Lorraine couldn’t hide her smile, watching him peel the shirt off his chest.

  “I was like, if they were going to miss him, then what’d be the point? Might as well have him around, you know, see if he’d grow up into something I could play with. Which he did,” Lee reflected.

  After a moment, Lorraine asked softly if Lee still hated he
r, and Lee said no, but admitted he didn’t like her very much, which Lorraine conceded was, in light of everything that had happened between them, fair. Then there was a useless pause that only made it all feel much sadder and more pointless than either one of them was willing to admit. Then Lorraine turned away, brushed something out of her eye with her sleeve, and started to leave the room with the baby.

  “Lorraine?”

  She didn’t stop. The ghost of her white pajamas trailed in the darkness for an instant after she was gone.

  “Lorraine.”

  Her footsteps fell away in the hallway.

  “Lorraine, I’m stuck.”

  APPOMATTOX

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There were no trees, no vegetation. Literally an entire mountain had been sliced in half, gutted, and reduced to artless mounds and slag piles by trucks the size of houses, and everything was covered with grime and rust and desolation.

  A second mountain evidently awaited the same cruel surrender.

  Hard, cold rain from a slate-grey dawn pressed steadily down on a massive strip-mining operation that looked like God forgot to finish this part of the earth.

  Sporty but sensible, Beachum’s Lexus coupe splashed along the rutted main road in, slowed slightly at a guard station where he was waved through by a man of such girth he could have been Doug Deere’s long-lost twin, and continued on to a collection of trailers with a sign that proclaimed:THE EMPIRE

  WORLD’S LARGEST MOLYBDENUM MINE

  SLOCUMB & SLOCUMB, INC.

  Beachum hopped from the car, ran into the main office, ran back out a moment later, and got back into the Lexus, winded, already soaked and shivering.

  “They’re under the ground,” he chided himself as though he’d missed some essential clue.

  The Lexus took off again, heading up a sawtooth, muddy road of whiplash switchbacks that climbed and climbed and climbed, then crested and disappeared into the man-made crater where a mountain once stood.

  In the same rain, Lee’s burned house bled black.

  Rain sluiced soot into runoff that spiderwebbed the driveway concrete around and under Grant’s Camaro. Grant stood outside the car in the downpour, facing the ruined house. Its structure was mostly intact, but it was brutally charred, the windows shattered, portions of the shingle roof burned through.

  Grant disappeared inside, then reemerged a moment later having remembered something; he crossed the driveway and waded into the glistening field of septic tank goose bumps, circling until he found the right place, then stood, bent over, studying the ground, hands on his knees, rainwater running down his face and arms and soaking through his shirt and jeans until he saw, in the mud, a spot of gold. Cold hands clawed it out.

  A wedding ring.

  Grant’s knees flexed and he rocked back, rested on his heels, and rolled Lee’s not-so-long-lost wedding band between his fingers. There was an inscription on the inside: “ever and forever.” Lorraine or Lee? he wondered. It was an epigram worthy of Lorraine’s unfettered optimism, but read more like Lee’s clueless determination.

  The rain eased. Fog or low clouds hung over the Evergreen valley, reaching nearly to the ground. There was no wind, and the sound of water dripping from the trees in the forests and from the eaves of the house and from the chassis of the Camaro and running down the gutter crackled like cellophane.

  Grant put the ring down on the ground and began to dig in the soft soil, scooping a hole nearly wrist deep before he stopped, dropped the ring in, and buried it completely. It took him eight minutes to drive to the public phone outside the gas station minimart in Bergen Park. The rain picked up and pounded down on him as he paid his quarter and dialed the number scrawled on Lorraine’s underwear. He waited for the voice-mail message and, at the prompt, pressed the pound key to leave a callback number, then hung up and hurried back to the warm, dry refuge of his car.

  The industrial elevator thrummed sonorously as it descended through solid rock. Its operator handed Beachum a yellow hard hat from a box behind him at the control panel. The hat was too small and rode on Beachum’s head like a push button, but it didn’t bother him.

  Beachum had always fancied himself a warrior. He’d been one of those boys who was fascinated by war, weapons, Batman (the Frank Miller Dark Knight incarnation), Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn, hard heroes with unwavering values whose righteous violence was directed only toward bad men (and, but less commonly, bad women) whose single goal in life was destroying the American way of life. As he got closer to the age at which he could actually enlist in the armed services, actually become one of those hard men, it became more difficult to reconcile the love he had for the idea of armed conflict with the anxiety he experienced whenever he tried to picture himself in a firefight. He hoped this didn’t mean he was a coward, and his increasingly hawkish political and social posturing was directly proportional to the intensity of his craven fears.

  The elevator doors split wide to a subterranean cavern startlingly illuminated by banks of hanging fluorescent lights, a gigantic man-made cavity carved from solid rock, perhaps five hundred feet long and a hundred feet in height. More huge Empire Mining machinery moved through it on connect-the-dot roadways, fantastic steel drilling equipment more buglike than Lee’s backhoe. Long mine cars carrying oar snaked and rattled down railroad tracks past Beachum, powered by unmanned drone locomotives.

  The Slocumbs were waiting for Beachum outside a sleek, modern, glassed-in office area slanting right out from the rock walls of the cavern, all North by Northwest. Both Slocumbs wore suits with white shirts and bolo ties.

  “’Lo,” Beachum drawled, squaring his shoulders and falling into what he hoped was a character not to be trifled with.

  “Hello then, Mr. Beachum. That’s a pretty swanky murse. Pleather?”

  Beachum bristled at the double-disparagement. “No, my friend. Pure cow.”

  They stood awkwardly, like boys at a freshman dance.

  “How ’bout this weather?” Beachum offered.

  “Where’s Mr. Garrison, sir?”

  “Busy. He’s had a run of unfortunate luck.”

  Saul pushed the corners of his mouth down as if sympathetic.

  “But,” Beachum continued, lively, “I have his proxy, his power of attorney, and his blessing.”

  “Oh yes,” Paul Slocumb said. “And I bet that blessing is a real bonus.”

  Rain was leaking into the Basso Profundo General Store from an overhead light fixture. Rayna noticed the puddle on the floor as she started restocking peach Snapple in the glass-door display refrigerator. A quick study of the ceiling tiles revealed a faint discoloration running along a seam from the light across the store to the wall separating the main floor from the storage room, so the roof leak was probably along the gutters on the mountain-facing side of the building, gutters that were endlessly clogging up with pine needles and subsequently overflowing. Rayna picked up the empty cartons and carried them into the back room where, sure enough, the discoloration split the ceiling and spread, in a corner, on the outside wall where, she knew too well, the gutter met the downspout.

  “Dammit.”

  Frustrated and tired, Rayna dropped the empties on a stack of other cartons for recycling. Then she looked to the wall again, frowning; looked to the wall where it wasn’t so much what she saw as what she didn’t see that startled her. There was that stupid parachute, on the floor, perfectly centered inside a rectilinear outline of dust on the concrete where there once had been a couple of small wooden crates of Austin Powder Company dynamite and assorted blasting supplies that Rayna kept handy for impatient fishermen and the occasional uncooperative tree stump that Mayor Barb liked to punch out of her lot.

  All the dynamite, detonator wire, and an ERNA-3 hand-cranked blasting machine had vanished.

  In fact, Rayna’s dynamite was cradled in a wheelbarrow that Lee was at that same moment negotiating through the obstinate mud of the Blue Lark Mine with increasing difficulty as the barrow’s wheel became
fouled with grit. The light from his helmet lanced a humid darkness and strobed across the rock.

  He stopped. He took five sticks of the explosives from one of the crates and duct-taped them together and tried to wedge them up into a fissure, using some sculpting putty he’d borrowed from what Ms. Davis liked to call her “atelier” at the high school.

  The clay and explosives fell loose from the wet rock. Lee tried it again. No luck. Finally, he just balanced the sticks on an outcropping and used putty to stabilize the detonator wire while he spooled it back down the tunnel in retreat.

  Through the glass wall of the Slocumbs’ subterranean office, Beachum could watch the impressive workings in the mine’s great room. His man bag was emptied on the big oak table, tablet glowing with Excel spreadsheets and documents neatly tiled around it. Paul and Saul perused them—standing, not sitting—as Beachum nervously filled the silence with his prattle.

  “One million dollars’ American money up front. Nonrefundable. Four hundred and forty-nine thousand dollars for the land itself on closing. Plus all fees—”

  “Can part of the fee be in stock?”

  Beachum bristled at the interruption. “You know what? Lee’s not all that interested in being your partners.”

  “This assay is unacceptable.”

  “Five percent of adjusted gross profits from mineral exploitation of gold deposits,” Beachum continued, ignoring Paul. “Two percent of any other mineral exploitation—”

  “This assay is unacceptable.”