A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  Twins of a single mind, the Slocumb brothers wondered if the deal would hold and decided, each of them, that it should and would.

  No one spoke on the flight back.

  Beachum looked lifeless.

  The pilot opened an air vent and frigid wind whistled through, serenading the three men with a tuneless dirge.

  Of course, initially it was all over the local evening news and the Internet, how an Evergreen high school teacher had died in a terrifying fall from a helicopter while flying with business associates to a gold-mining claim on the western slope of Argentine Pass. There was no reason given, and nothing about preflight hyperventilation or Pakistani twins, or Beachum’s regurgitated Moons Over My Hammy, not yet; nothing about fleece-lined boots clomping across a snow-dusted tarmac, late for their meeting, and catching up finally with three parka-clad men who greeted him cordially and made no comment with regard to the cuts and scrapes and Band-Aids on his colorless face and boarded the red helicopter that rose into a dreamy fog.

  And nothing about dark gray nimbostratus clouds, out of which a tiny paper doll of a man appeared, spreadeagled, falling, falling.

  Coatless.

  A parachute strapped to his chest.

  He pulled the ripcord and silk played out in a silvery flame. He never worried whether it had been properly packed—somehow he knew it had—and the white canopy opened, and the man was yanked out of free fall, floating down, down, down where suddenly the clouds were pulled apart, leaving wispy cottony threads of moisture through which Lee drifted, down toward a shredded white and dark undulating surface that might be a treeless, snow-swept high-country mesa, or a whitecapped ocean, or both.

  It was never a big story, though.

  The lack of high stakes or verifiable treasure doomed it quickly to the “strange news” cycle, a tale of failure leading to a flamboyant suicide; it got no national play, cycled and done in less than a week.

  Later-breaking updates and Internet rumor snarked with cynical claims that the victim, Lee Garrison of Evergreen, was trying to sell a worthless mining operation to some Wyoming investors who would, several days later, find themselves under indictment and facing extradition to Kansas for possible felony charges involving extortion and maybe even murder, and denying allegations that the forty-year-old physics teacher fell after a brief cockpit struggle, or potentially was even pushed from the helicopter, until official sources announced, no, it was suicide, a sad consequence of the aforementioned Lee Garrison’s elaborate gold-mining Ponzi scheme that was about to be exposed.

  But the felony murder rap in Kansas stuck. And the Slocumbs were undone. They never recovered from it. Already leveraged to the hilt in their mining operations, the Wyoming-bred Pakistani-American twins racked up unrecoupable legal fees that eventually forced them to liquidate their businesses, one by one, to sundry deep-pocket, mostly Chinese mining consortiums at bottom-feeder prices. A last-ditch stock offering to shore up the Empire went south when Saul was rumored to have flunked a lie detector test his attorney had arranged to refute Salina Police Detective Friendly’s claims that Paul had flown to Kansas by private aircraft the day before the prospector Gordon Bunn’s mysterious hanging. Eventually the twins would turn on each other, perjure themselves, and begin constructing intricate, contradictory indictments that would never be reconciled or verified. A group of Wyoming Tea Party conservatives began a letter-writing campaign demanding the immediate deportation of the Slocumbs, calling them domestic terrorists and Islamic extremists despite the fact that both men were baptized and confirmed and had accepted Jesus as their Savior in the Holy Laramie Presbyterian Church.

  Those stories went viral.

  The facts became unimportant.

  The gesture, the fetish, the show was the sum and the endgame.

  Around timberline, rocky hillocks rose from tenuous pure-white dunes of summer snow, and the icy flakes were blowing, blurring the sharp shadows and rising up startled like Don King’s hair. A briefcase had tumbled down from above and hit some hardscape and broken apart, throwing papers and plywood snowshoe parts and hardware in all directions.

  A lone figure clomped over a ridge: Grant, all bundled up with store-bought snowshoes and a backpack. He arrived at the busted briefcase, stared at it for a moment, then kicked off his snowshoes and shrugged off his pack and removed a plastic medical pouch of freshly drawn blood.

  He punctured the blood bag with a car key. Once. Twice. Then squeezed blood wildly from the bag to the ground and snow around his feet.

  A KOA reporter broke the story that a point of impact had been discovered by the victim’s brother, days later, after an exhaustive search. The Denver Fox affiliate said traces of blood, a shattered briefcase, false identification, airline tickets for South America, and a pair of fold-up snowshoes the victim planned to use in his escape had been found. Mr. Garrison, one Fox wag noted, had been a registered Democrat and once signed his name to a petition supporting doctor-assisted suicide.

  DNA analysis matched the blood on the scene to the victim.

  But no one could confirm a body.

  If anyone had thought of it, a careful canvassing of Colorado blood banks and blood donation facilities might have led to a modest doc-in-a-box just north of Idaho Springs, where a graveyard-shift RN named Jenny could have been coaxed to remember two young men, brothers, who came to give blood and left with it.

  But no one followed that line of reasoning.

  And Jenny got her news from Twitter and TMZ.

  And a body was never found.

  It was vast, unforgiving, untraveled terrain. There were limited resources available for a prolonged search. Wild animals were likely to have scattered the evidence. Or digested it.

  After he finished spreading Lee’s blood, Grant had folded up the empty blood-bank pouch and sealed it in a plastic bag and put it back in his pack. Wind carried the sound of his whistling away. Grant squinted up into the midsummer sun. The snow would melt fast. It would be a green August, buggy and strange.

  Good for fishing, but Grant didn’t fish.

  He turned and walked back over the ridge.

  Labor Day found Rayna’s Basso Profundo General Store boarded up and for sale, and Mayor Barb was putting a currycomb to her horse in her side yard and paying pretty much no attention whatsoever to the mine road where Lorraine’s Chevy Suburban zagged and bounced upward on the switchbacks to where the Blue Lark Mine waited, reconfigured, with the conspicuous new and improved lower-level adit from which Grant emerged, slick with sweat, squinting in the daylight and struggling to control his wheelbarrow full of rust-red muck and upend it in a leeching pond; he watched as the Suburban arrived with Lorraine and his daughter, and when they spilled, both laughing, from the car, the smile that broke across his face was worth whatever price had been paid to unearth it.

  This was the truce, the reunion, Lee’s triumph, everything finally on the same side of the Divide: friends, family, future, even collapsed hopes, dreams, mines, digs long forgotten, Creede’s folly, broken promises, abandoned claims.

  But it would be six, or eight, or ten more months later, in the aftermath of a tropical squall, blades of sun fanned fantastical through a teal silk sky of popcorn clouds, in a watery trough, in the storm-tossed Sea of Cham, where a fine old Nordhavn trawler moved steadily through the mountainous waves, that Lee would be found in the pilothouse, at the helm, with beard and battered baseball cap, and made to answer for his crimes.

  A swell caught his boat and lifted it and suddenly there was a big bright white coastal cutter, not very far away at all, as close as it could get under the circumstances, with Chinese naval markings and a man in uniform at a megaphone yelling something that got lost in the wind and waves.

  Not only couldn’t Lee find words in the squalling of the megaphone, the guy was speaking Cantonese. So Lee just waved.

  The man yelled and pointed to the back of the Chinese cutter.

  At Rayna, in a slicker and life vest, clutching a railing
for all she was worth, her hair wet and dark and straggly and her lips raw and her eyes tired.

  She waved back, queasy.

  Lee’s boat disappeared into the trough of another monstrous swell.

  The Chinese crew expertly fired a line across the water to Lee when his boat came up again; he retrieved it and secured it and the tethered boats went up and down, up and down, up and down like a carnival ride, and Rayna was sick again.

  A rubber dinghy tumbled off the side of Lee’s boat and into the water, two lines attached to it, one that he played out, the other the Chinese sailors used to pull the dinghy toward them.

  The sailors lowered Rayna into the tiny craft. They tossed some soft bags down to her, and Lee began to haul her back across.

  But the cutter crew threw their rope off and pulled away, leaving Lee and Rayna to fend for themselves.

  “Wait! Wait’ll she gets over here!”

  The cutter disappeared over a wave. Now there was just Lee in his trawler and Rayna in her dinghy, connected by the hopeful miracle of a single nylon line on a tumult of sun-dappled water that could vanish them both on a whim.

  She rose on a wave to a height of ten feet above him.

  She was shouting down at him.

  “What?”

  She was shouting.

  “You’ve got to help me,” he yelled to her.

  But as he pulled the line he realized she was adding to the slack, preventing him from hauling her to safety.

  “Say it!” she shouted. He could barely hear her. She disappeared behind a whitecap.

  “What?!”

  “Say . . . ”

  A wave clipped her. She fell back into the dinghy, and the dinghy slid over a tent of green water and was gone. The nylon umbilical unspooled and burned through his hands. Gone.

  “Say what? Rayna?!”

  Lee jumped to the bridge, throttled up, gunned the engine, and came around as the wave broke over his starboard. The screws churned, exposed by the slope of the water.

  The dinghy was tossed up on the next swell. Rayna’s hands appeared first, clutching the side of the rubber boat, then her face rose behind them, smiling crazily, happy, scared, looking right at him, no more than five feet away, clothes soaked and plastered against her.

  She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  “Say it,” she said, over the wind and the water, conversationally, no big deal. “Say it to me.”

  It took him only half a beat to remember. “I love you,” he said. “I love you like crazy. I respect you. But . . . what do you think, Rayna?”

  Rayna floated up on that carpet of emerald-green sea-swell, and somehow stayed there, defying every law of fluids and gravity, above him, looking down at him.

  “I think this is perfect,” she said.

  The wave fell away. The dinghy capsized. Rayna spread her arms wide and leapt for the bridge of the trawler. And Lee.

  And somewhat later, naked under a roiling cataclysm of storm-tossed bedclothing, she fell away from him, out of his arms, radiant. The boat swayed violently, light going every which way.

  “Perfect?” Lee said, shaking his head. “Boy are you ever wrong.”

  Then, energized, he was up, out of the bed, down the short hallway, into the main salon, and by the time Rayna caught up with him, Lee was emerging from an overflowing galley storage bin, flashlight clenched in his mouth, aimed down, eyes intent, clutching long fat rolls of yellow paper—parchment maps—which he hurried over to the table, where Rayna waited in his plaid flannel bathrobe.

  “Brace yourself.”

  Happy but drily she said, “Amaze me.”

  He unfurled an intricate antiquarian cartographer’s map. Seaways of an ancient mariner, vaguely Catalan, hand-inked, with spiderweb trade routes, unpronounceable names, and nonexistent islands.

  “I found these in Jakarta,” he said.

  “Isn’t that a Target price tag?” Rayna noticed, trying not to be too critical, but already too wise to Lee’s dreamy float.

  “Third world can’t enjoy discount pricing?”

  Rayna laughed.

  Another mariner’s map covered the first. This one looked even older, a mappa mundi, with overtones of Marco Polo’s Book of Marvels and the mid-millennium orbis terrarum T and O style: Jerusalem in the center of the world, Garden of Eden fast on the elbow of Africa, and the sideways T comprised by the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Don rivers. It was torn, leathered, beverage-stained, with French writing scrawled up and across one margin and Italian down the other. Lee reached for and took Rayna’s hand from the edge of the table where she’d braced herself to look closer. She folded into him, warm.

  “Point,” he said.

  She did, and he guided her hand across the treasure map, using her extended index finger to indicate: “We’re here. We’re right here, in the South China Sea,” Lee told her, “just shy of the Scarborough Shoal. And it seems perfect here, doesn’t it? It does. Perfect. Like you said. But.”

  “Lee?”

  “Keep pointing.”

  She did.

  He traced with her finger . . . slowly . . . lightly . . . navigating across boundaries and crisscrossing rhumb and ley lines and latitudes; secrets and sorrows; strange markings; oyster bays and lobster cays; spice fields; dead calm; corsairs; hundred-year wars; brothers’ betrayals and brothers’ absolution; warnings of whirlpools, tsunamis, and mad typhoons; sea monsters; magic islands; sirens; banshees; white whales and metaphors; skirting to the edge of the known observable world where the impassable torrid clime separated the saved from the damned of the antipodes. And dreams, miners’ dreams, mariners’ dreams, dreamers’ dreams, and yes, finally, drifting to a queer, wiggly notation made somewhere, anywhere, on this strange explorer’s map that Rayna suspected Lee had probably drawn himself—their hands together drifting to the middle of some vast undiscovered ocean, where there was more worried writing, so small and exotic as to be indecipherable.

  “Over here,” he said, looking up at her, “I guess somebody once thought there was gold.”

  He’d drawn the map of their world, with all its disappointment, danger, and uncertainty, an impossible, wondrously skewed Mercator projection, hoping (or knowing?) she’d come.

  “People think a lot of things,” she said, quiet.

  Lost and found, he let the current take him, a steadfast flowing monsoon surface drift. His strong, soft, sure, carpenter’s hand resting lightly over Rayna’s, her body safe against his; together their hands sailed off the map.

  And he kissed her neck behind her ear where it began its perfect curve.

  “That’s true,” he said.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The saying “A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar,” or, alternately, “A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top,” has been commonly attributed, over the years, to Mark Twain. There is, however, some disagreement among modern Twain scholars on its origin and legitimacy. It may in fact have been coined by Edgar Wilson (a.k.a. “Bill”) Nye, a nineteenth-century editor and wag Twain was occasionally known to quote, or by Eli Perkins, pen name of Melville Landon, another humorist and contemporary of Twain’s. Whoever said it understood that mining for gold, like falling in love, involves not just a suspension of disbelief, but also purposive action, which makes it dangerous, and transports you to the strangest places, lies and all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My brother Chuck, who did, in fact, buy a mine up near Argentine Pass, and my sister Suz, who, wisely, didn’t.

  Julia Gibson, Saxon Traynor, and the Big E for their insightful early draft notes and comments. Convo for his unbridled enthusiasm when there was only a prologue. Max for his grammatical wizardry borne of Latin taught by nuns. Charlie Winton for the soup and sandwiches, Julie Pinkerton for pretty much everything that got better in the writing of it, and, yes, Joan for pretty much everything else.

  Chuck Kinder for teaching me how to write fiction; Colorado pioneer Elizabeth Rice Rolle
r for her plainspoken Summit Historical Society pamphlet, “Memoirs From Montezuma, Chihuahua & St. Johns”; Douglas Southall Freeman’s seminal four-volume biography, R. E. Lee; and Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography, Memoirs and Selected Letters.

  The lyrics for “Sweet Betsy from Pike” (page 47), which I learned in Mrs. Knapp’s third grade, were written by John A. Stone sometime before 1858, based on the English ballad “Villikins and his Dinah.” The hymn “Nor Silver Nor Gold” (page 133) was written by James M. Gray and composed by Daniel B. Towner around the turn of the twentieth century.

  Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Pyne. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pyne, Daniel.

  A hole in the ground owned by a liar / Daniel Pyne.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-619-02037-5

  1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Colorado—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.Y56H65 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2011039680

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