A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  “Okay. Let’s get a new assay. Meantime I’ll just shop the deal around to some other major mining concerns.” Beachum loved to play the bluff; it always worked, even when they knew you were bluffing.

  Saul Slocumb said, “No. That won’t be necessary.”

  “Twenty percent of any other mineral exploitation and . . . ” Beachum, back to the most important part, his terms and conditions: “my fifteen percent commission. On signing. And I want some stock.”

  Both Slocumbs looked up at Beachum at the same time.

  “I’m the only one he trusts.”

  A Chevy Suburban pulled into the driveway next to Grant’s car, and Lorraine got out, wearing a yellow rain slicker, and she ran in high heels through the sooty puddles to the front porch.

  Inside Lee’s house it was charred and spooky, and the rain dripped and sweated through gaps in the roof where fire axes had worked at hot spots. A huge hole in the living room wall was covered with milky plastic that breathed in and out with the wind.

  “Grant?”

  Lorraine moved cautiously through the house, watching her step.

  “Grant?”

  At the second sound of his name, a string of multicolored Christmas tree lights flickered on, strange and beautiful. A dotted line leading her through the ruined kitchen, down a murky hallway, and into Lee’s bedroom where soot and smoke were the primary damage, and Grant waited in a crèche of twinkle lights and votive candles and plastic light-up Christmas lawn ornaments, some partially melted into strangely elegant abstractions.

  “The power’s still on in the garage,” Grant said. “I ran an extension cord. Which, hmmm, I mean, isn’t that, like, rule number one or two in the firefighting manual, i.e., ’turn off the electricity,’ probably right up there after ’turn off the gas’?”

  “They’re only volunteers,” Lorraine said. “They saved your house.”

  “Lee’s house,” Grant corrected her. “And not entirely.”

  “They saved part of it.”

  “And the bed.” Grant threw back the blackened duvet cover to reveal bright white sheets, damp but undamaged. Ashes swirled in the air.

  “I dreamed you called,” Lorraine said. “The other night? But I can’t remember what you said.”

  “Maybe I told you about how I keep trying to help my brother and how I keep fucking everything up.”

  Lorraine took her coat off. She hung it on the cedar antlers of a beautifully lacquered, high school wood shop reindeer nailed to the wall.

  “No. That wasn’t it.”

  She kicked off her shoes, crossed the room, put her arms around him, and kissed him, hard. Her lips were cold. The bottoms of her feet were stained black. Lace ashes and soot swirled in phantasms of loneliness and guilt around them. Lorraine felt feverish, despite the damp.

  “Not everything is your fault, baby,” she told him. “Some of us are perfectly capable of fucking things up entirely on our own.”

  A big flashlight in one hand like a relay baton, Rayna ran up the mine road, dodging deep puddles and sliding on slicks of hardpan. Rain poured down from black clouds. The broken mine buildings took on a spectral quality as the wood became soaked. Mist webbed the forest and the hiss of the rain on the trees and the rock followed her up to the clearing, and the flat pad of tailings where an ERNA-3 hand-cranked detonating machine sat prominently under a makeshift awning of plywood, water nonetheless beading on the plastic housing and dripping from its poised handle, wire snaking away from it, and Rayna, following this unlikely track, ran wet and scared, lungs burning and legs aching, toward the mine opening and into it (“Lee?”), sloshing through the dark tunnel (“Lee!”) where only a couple of the overhead lights were still intact and lit, highlighting charred timbers that had half-collapsed from the walls, and followed the uncoiled wires that dipped in and out of the muddy precipitate on the floor like a serpentine swamp monster; then her gaze leapt to the ceiling where sticks of dynamite were wedged in with putty and bits of wood and steel nails, or nothing at all, just balanced, and her heart kind of flopped, or skipped, with a foreboding, and she floated past the planted charges, zigzagging to the main intersection of the mine shafts, where suddenly the wires coiled and tangled and seemed to take off in several directions, and she found Lee straddling an overhead beam above the flooded downshaft, hammering another charge in place.

  “Stop.”

  He did. He looked the same, which is to say he looked as he always did, nothing of the mad scientist or mad bomber or whatever she might have expected. His eyes were clear and kind, looking at her curiously, as if placing dynamite and running detonation wire was something he did every day.

  She put her hands on her knees and tried to fill her lungs with air, and she couldn’t talk, and then she could, and she looked up and aimed her flashlight at him. He shaded his eyes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s my dynamite.”

  Lee looked at the sticks of explosive he’d been positioning up in the niche and made a passable attempt to pretend he’d never seen them before. “Is it?” He finished hammering the spike into the rock, then wound some wire around the spike and the dynamite, securing it. “Hand me that wire, will you? I’m glad you’re not smoking.”

  Rayna’s flashlight beam dipped to the dynamite crate in the wheelbarrow next to her and found the detonating wire. She shook her head. “Lee.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “You already asked that.”

  “You said ‘Nothing.’”

  Lee conceded this, then admitted he was, yes, doing something.

  “With my dynamite.”

  “Maybe. Yes.”

  She waited. No further explanation was forthcoming. Lee pushed his wet hair back and exhaled. She could see his breath.

  “What are you blowing up?” she asked.

  “Everything,” he said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  In the ruined bedroom of Lee’s ruined house, Lorraine finally grew tired of kissing and rolled up on top of Grant, pulling her knees under her, and hitching up her dress. They didn’t say anything to each other. Clothes came off, but not many of them, because of the cold and their impatience and an economy of purpose that came as naturally as the rain splashing on the windowsills and through the fractured windowpanes.

  Their breath was visible in diaphanous gasps.

  The heat from their bodies generated a sifting, transparent brume that eddied and swirled as they shifted and stretched on the sheets of the bed she had once shared with Lee.

  And Lorraine, softly, a stone skipping, a meadowlark’s refrain, said, “Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh.”

  “They can have the land,” Lee explained to Rayna. “They can have the mineral rights,” Lee said. “But that’s all.”

  He was struggling to control the wheelbarrow, scribing a deep arc in the mud with the front tire while negotiating a creosote-slicked support beam that had collapsed in the middle of the main intersection. Rayna was close behind him.

  “That sounds like everything. What’s left?” she asked.

  Lee stopped and considered her blankly. Water poured down into the mine from above them. Rayna looked up into a rocky void.

  “Where’s that coming from?”

  “There’s a vent,” Lee said. “Or maybe it was a partial cave-in—don’t worry—years ago. It goes up about a hundred feet to a sinkhole on the ridge. Doug almost fell in it.”

  Then, continuing, “They can have the gold. But they can’t have the space, between the rocks, the shafts, the passageways, this, where we’re standing, what we’ve excavated, where I—where I dreamed that—”

  “Dreamed that what?” Rayna pressed him, impatient for him to finish after he just stopped mid-sentence, overwhelmed.

  “What?”

  “Where you dreamed what?”

  Lee eased the handles of the wheelbarrow down until the skids stopped it. His arms ached, and he shook th
em out and looked at Rayna, eyes narrowing, suddenly bemused. “Wait. You didn’t think I was going to blow myself up in here?”

  Before Rayna could answer, the mine shaft in front of them collapsed with a dull thundering rumble of rock, dropping unimpressively inward, a wave breaking in on them. Outside, the mountainside rolled in on itself in a straight line back from what used to be the mine opening: a crude, soggy, granite soufflé losing air, settling with a subaural thump.

  On the other side of the cave-in, Lee pivoted, grabbed Rayna, lifted her off her feet, and carried her away, stumbling, as charred timbers buckled around them and rock splintered and the mine shafts lost shape. She dropped her flashlight. He pushed her ahead of him and yelled something about putting her arms over her head. Lee’s helmet rocked off, and the light on it shattered, and everything went completely dark.

  Ash from black-dusted bedcovers snowed upward into the muggy thermals that had gathered in Lee’s bedroom as Lorraine climaxed, loudly, joyously, and the bed shook; she held nothing back and then melted into delighted laughter. Grant was too spent to make any noise, but his brain screamed God Almighty.

  “That was worth it,” Lorraine said. “That was so worth any wait. Holy shit.” She kissed him and collapsed on him, shivering.

  “You’re going to leave me again, aren’t you?” she asked, after a while.

  Grant made the cogent observation that she was married to Stan Beachum.

  “Only technically,” she said. “I’m fond of him, I guess, but, oh, mostly? I felt sorry about what you did to him, and, well, you know how it is, Grant; guilt just rules me.”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Until I see you,” she added, ignoring what she knew he meant. “If you asked me, I’d go away with you right now.”

  Grant did not doubt it.

  “But you won’t,” she said. “You won’t.”

  Why didn’t you tell me about the baby? Grant wanted to ask her. Why didn’t you write to me and tell me, and why was it only after I came back here that you did tell me? Would she have kept it a secret if he hadn’t come back? In his entire life he’d never had so many fucking questions. But instead he just breathed her name, “Lorraine.”

  She put her fingers against his lips, tenderly, shushing him. “Well answer me this, Batman, if you can get your cape out of your ass: Your brother came to my, our, me and Stan, our goddamn doorstep last night—”

  “Lee?”

  “No, your other brother. And he asked Stan to help him sell the gold mine—”

  Grant’s interrogation overlapped her: “Lee was at your house? Sell the mine to who?”

  “—all wound up, middle of the night, crawling into the baby’s crib, if you can believe it, and sat in there going on about you. What?”

  Grant lifted her off him, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and started to get up. “He can’t sell the mine.”

  “And it came to me. In a kind of flash. You’ve got to let him go,” Lorraine said. “You.”

  “I’ve committed some fraud,” Grant said. “Sort of.”

  “Oh God. Again?”

  “This time they’ll blame it on him. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta,” Grant was pulling on his pants and had an agitated, forward-looking frown on his face that she knew was his tell for the worried thinking of an overprotective and restive younger brother. She’d seen it once before. That hadn’t turned out so well.

  “Where is he?”

  “Lee needs to fight his own battles,” she said.

  “Lorraine. You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, so—”

  “You need to get out of his way.”

  Grant grabbed her and shook her and frightened her with the intensity of his need to know: “Lorraine, where is he?”

  For a long time it wasn’t darkness; it was absence of light. Utterly and completely.

  With a drip, drip, dripping of rainwater bleeding through rock, muck was washed from Rayna’s abandoned flashlight, which had stuck fast in the crush of rock facing up, miraculously, the pooling water on the lens giving birth to a sallow light, primal, a dull molten glow that became brighter and brighter as the muck sluiced from the glass.

  The freed beam of light cut the humid midnight of the collapsed mine and pinned Lee’s ghost face against a glistening wall of rock. He put his hand up to shade his eyes, and the beam split into trapezoidal fragments.

  “Rayna? Where are you?”

  A sound in the darkness. Watery and scared. “I don’t know.”

  Lee followed the line of light and dug the flashlight from the muck and cast it around, searching what remained of the mine. It found Rayna under a crisscross of broken timber, trapped like a cricket in a cage on the edge of the downshaft. She was moving. Somehow she’d been saved.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  “I’m pretty scared, Lee,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  He swung the flashlight back in the other direction, and it was as if Rayna no longer existed. As if nothing existed except what he caught in the beam of the flashlight. And what he saw was tumbled rock where once there was a passageway out.

  “Are you afraid of the dark, Rayna?”

  “I don’t think so. Not usually. It’s sort of comforting sometimes.”

  “Good.”

  He turned off the light, plunging them again into oblivion.

  “We’ve got plenty of comfort then.”

  No light, and silence.

  The eastern grade of I-70, approaching the Eisenhower Tunnel, was slick with rain. Traffic crawled cautiously in both directions, tires hissing. Weird, low, torn-off clouds hung in the valley below Loveland Pass.

  Grant’s Camaro powered up the hill doing about 100. He blew past a turtle-slow semi and was sucked into the tunnel.

  The flashlight pulsed, and for a moment there was a freeze-frame of Lee crawling carefully across fallen rock and broken beams on his way to Rayna, and then it was pitch-black again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Did you put new batteries in your flashlight today?”

  Another burst of light. He had nearly reached her.

  “No. But they were new when I put them in, and I never use that flashlight.”

  “So they could be—the batteries—two years old? Three?”

  “Lee, I really don’t—”

  “Let’s think this through,” Lee said, as if for a Thursday lab in his Honors Physics class. “You used the flashlight and batteries to come and find me. We don’t know how long we’ve been in here since the mine collapsed. Or how long your flashlight was under the mud before it got washed clean.”

  The flashlight came on, and he was right on the other side of her cricket cage, looking in at her. Then off.

  “It’s my experience that people never have flashlights with batteries that last for more than fifteen minutes unless they put the batteries in today from a new blister pack.”

  The flashlight came on again, light busting down hard on Rayna from above where Lee was lying across the fallen beams, looking at her. She squinted and blinked unhappily. He reached in and brushed some mud from her temple.

  “They were new when I put them in,” she said.

  “You want to test my theory or trust me?”

  The flashlight started to dim noticeably, the beam waning from white, to yellow, to orange.

  “Could you repeat the options, please?”

  The world went pitch-black again. But her fingers found his hand and held it with all she had.

  Down on Main Street, Grant’s Camaro raced into Basso Profundo, shedding mud and mist. He sprung out of the car and up onto the porch of the General Store, calling for Rayna. No answer.

  Back to the idling car, he lurched off again.

  At the end of the road, the Camaro went into a controlled drift, found the upslope of the Blue Lark access road, and fishtailed through the trees. All the washboard ruts in the road had gone viscous soft
in the rain, and the low-slung muscle car sank further and further, finally stopping altogether on a hairpin curve, nose buried in a micro–rock slide, headlights bloodshot with mud, and tires chirring uselessly.

  Grant got out and started to run up the hill.

  “Now grab my hand again.”

  Rayna was moving, albeit blindly. Grasping at slick timbers and jabbing her hands out to keep from cracking her head on something. Dripping sounds. Rustling sounds. Lee’s voice, calm, soothing:

  “Grab my hand. There. Now I’m going to—see?—put it on this beam, and you just . . . curl around it . . . there. Good. There’s another beam about eight inches above you—”

  “That better be your other hand on my ass, and not some huge wet spider.”

  “There you go.”

  Rustling sounds, bodies falling together.

  “Is that really you? Oh, shit, oh my, hold me. Hold me.”

  There was silence then. Dripping of water, and Rayna’s choppy breathing. Now and then there were the usual, creepy, deep-groaning ghostly grievances expressed from deep inside the mountain.

  Coblynau or whatever, Lee thought.

  “We’re dying in here, aren’t we?” she said.

  Lee didn’t answer.

  “I’m just asking because the new me asks.”

  There was no comforting response from Lee.

  Grant climbed up onto the platform of tailings, exhausted, soaked with rain and wheezing from the run. He passed Doug Deere’s broken, molested Subaru. When he saw the collapse where the adit once was, he stumbled, stopped, his mouth opened, and a single, disbelieving, mournful sound came out.

  He blinked the rain from his eyes and let his gaze travel the length of wire from the fallen mountainside to the yellow detonation device at his feet. Then his gaze swept south to the generator off to the far side of the mine.

  He ran to it. Put his palm flat against the flat metal of the engine housing. Still warm.