Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “I could say you’re my cousin, come to visit.”

  “I should go,” Al repeats.

  Meg puts her hand on Al’s shoulder. It is a ten-colored tropical bird, perched there. “See you at Lilac’s then?”

  “At Lilac’s.” Al slips down the empty staircase and onto the empty street before anyone can discover which world she has sneaked into, and which she’s slithered out of.

  Weeks later, the row of women at the bar goes: femme, butch, butch, femme, femme, butch. More specifically: Meg, Al, Jody, Imogen, Sylvie, Jean. So that each woman can be seated between her love and her confidante. It’s been three weeks, 17 kisses and one half-naked romp. Meg and Al are official. So are Sylvie and Jean, Meg’s ex. The two new couples slid together easily, and it feels like destiny.

  Meg is tracing circles on Al’s slacks with her red-polished finger. Al is finding it difficult to concentrate on what Jody is saying, something about President Johnson, how he will never measure up to Kennedy, who would have ushered in a new era if he had lived. “He understood young people, he thought the way we think,” Jody says.

  “Sounds like he’s got your vote,” Shallan jokes.

  “Politics according to Jody,” says Imogen, rolling her eyes. She turns to Sylvie, who is ignoring Jean the way women ignore their husbands, and Jean is left dangling like a husband, drumming the bar with her fingers.

  “I’ll tell you what else about President Kennedy,” Jody says, fist meeting shiny wood bar in emphasis. “Everyone was so worried about him being more loyal to the Pope than to the Constitution, right? Well, this is what I say: they didn’t need to worry because the Pope is overseas, far away, in Europe or wherever. And the Constitution is right here. I mean, maybe not framed in the presidential bedroom or nothing, but he was still surrounded by it. He woke up every day in the White House, met with Congress, maybe listened to a Supreme Court hearing now and then, ate some nice American lunch. You can’t just forget all that, no matter how much you love Invisible God and Invisible Pope. You do what the people around you do.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” says Imogen. “I liked him too, but I think if he were still alive, people’d be picking on him same as Johnson. He’d be a little better looking, but he’d do dumb things, too. He’d mess with Asia and Cuba some more. It’s just ’cause he’s dead that everybody loves him. People like living in the past, especially white people. They can look back on five, ten, a hundred years ago and say, ’Aw, look how pretty and golden everything was back then.’ And that pretty picture guides whatever they do in present times.”

  Meg has ceased to make circles on Al’s thigh and is now scribbling something else. A code! Al’s skin perks. Her love is sending her a message. “Start from the beginning,” she tries to whisper out of the side of her mouth. Jody and Imogen don’t seem to notice.

  “What?” Meg whispers.

  “Start from the beginning.”

  L… And then, another L? No, wait, two horizontal slashes: E.

  “And Jackie, she’s a cool cat. really classy, don’t you think?”

  Down, across. T. LET. Curve like, like Meg’s profile. Ssss.

  “She’s really exotic looking. I wouldn’t mind her as my first lady, if you know what I mean.”

  “God, Jody, don’t be disgusting. You’re making all the white girls blush.”

  LETS G, another E, another T. LETS GET. What, another drink? Ice cream?

  “And no one’s gonna buy your dumb soapboxes when they come after Johnson’s been president for almost two years. You’re a little behind in your speeches there, Jo.”

  LETS GET O-U-T O-F—

  “Yes, let’s,” Al breathes in Meg’s ear, and they exchange secret smiles and they’re off down Calla Boulevard, forgetting to drop hands, climbing into Meg’s pale yellow Ford, moonlight buttering its curves, spitting twin rivers of gravel as they wind toward the mountains, thinking about where they’re going only after a bit of necking.

  Al is behind the wheel, squinting at the road and trying not to let Meg’s fingers on her earlobe send her careening into a ditch.

  “Lilac Mines needs more streetlights,” Al complains.

  “Are you kidding? That means more getting caught. In the dark you can totally pass for a guy.”

  Al perks a little. Even with clothes that fit, she’s not sure she fits. She believes that Jody and Jean and Shallan are butch down to their bones, but Al is short, with small hands and hesitant, fluttering insides.

  Meg has a fabulous way of folding her legs on the passenger seat. Smooth white feet in a delightful tangle of sandal straps, toenails a pearly moon color. After wearing men’s clothes for a time, Al has also developed a removed fascination with women’s clothes, as if it takes a particular talent, a particular stoic grace to wear them.

  Driving in Lilac Mines is a vertical experience. Up and up, loop and loop. Meg wants to show her something. She navigates from the passenger seat: turn here, turn here. The pine trees shoot out of the ground beside them, quiet arrows aimed at the sky.

  Then: thunk. The car rattles and skids, not off the road, but its confidence seems to be shaken. “What was that?” breathes Al, foot to brake.

  “Just a pothole. It’s a gravel road. There are gonna be more, darling.”

  They’re stopped now. “Still. I don’t know this road well enough. Can you drive?” She’s worried Meg will roll her eyes. She’s patient and all—21 to Al’s 19, a virtual divorcée—but there are certain things a butch is supposed to do. But Meg’s fingers are already around the door handle, her enticingly sandaled foot is already on the ground.

  Before getting out, she leans back in and kisses Al on the cheek: “I love you.”

  Al gasps at Meg’s casual passion and at the random gestures that prompt it. She feels as if she’s only a few blocks away from love herself, but miles from comprehension.

  Meg tears up the switchbacks, trees blurring, only blackness in the rearview mirror—as if there is nothing at all behind them, no past, no nothing—and Al wills herself not to clutch the safety handle above the window. This is her way of I Love You, this is I Am Putting My Life In Your Slightly Tipsy Hands. She looks at Meg, who leans into the steering wheel and the accelerator. There is something reckless about her, like she is capable of big, forbidden love and of other, darker things. Al saw that look in Suzy’s eyes in the weeks before she boarded the bus. But on Meg, the look is not fleeting. She brushes a brown curl away from her face, as if nothing will come between her and the road.

  And before Al can figure anything out, they are there. The Place. It looks like any other slight flattening of the mountain until Meg aims the headlights at a row of boards, seemingly nailed directly into the hillside like a giant eye patch.

  “Lilac Mines,” Meg says.

  “Wow,” is all Al can say.

  Outside the car, it is mountain-cold: thin-aired, red-nosed, Christmas-scented. Dutifully, Al holds Meg’s insufficient coat as she slips into it. Al feels Meg’s arms animate the cloth with her warm, wriggling body. If this were the city, they would see lights stretched out below them and a gray sky above. But this is Lilac Mines, so they see the reverse: a vast black valley beneath an upside-down city of stars. It all feels upside-down to Al. She is a speck in the middle of nowhere… but that’s the thing, it’s the middle of nowhere: the absolute, pulsing epicenter of it.

  Behind her, Meg has broken two fingernails prying boards back, revealing the socket beneath the patch. “Wanna see the mine?”

  “Aren’t there. aren’t there, I don’t know, coyotes or mountain lions in there?”

  “Nothing bigger than could fit through these boards. Besides, it’s true, you know. about them being more scared of you than you are of them.”

  Meg kneels in her dress, which was pink in the bar but now, like everything in Al’s view, is just another shade of gray.

  “It’s warmer in here, that’s the main thing,” Meg says. Then she continues her history lesson. “Actually, I don�
��t think there ever was a Lilac Mine. That’s just what they started calling it after the little girl died. I think the mine itself was called something horribly dull. Western Mining Company Mine or something. This isn’t the main entrance. We passed that on the road five miles back. This one is sort of hidden away.”

  They huddle together on the other side of the boards. We are sitting in someone’s eye, Al thinks. The vast brain of the mountain thinks its secret thoughts behind them. Strings of dusty light squeeze between the boards, the only reminder of the car and the world outside.

  “What do you mean, ’when the little girl died?’ ” Al asks.

  Meg is quiet for a minute. Al studies her flat white cheeks, the large hands and sturdy arms that pull her knees to her chest.

  “In 1899,” Meg begins, “the mine was doing really good business. The town was one big silver factory. There was a miner named Mr. Ambrose, I think his first name was Gerald, or Harold maybe.”

  “Gerald is my dad’s name,” Anna Lisa says, but this interrupts Meg’s once-upon-a-time tone, so she clamps her mouth shut.

  “And he had a daughter, Lilac, who was 16 or 17. She was beautiful, with dark red hair, and she had little freckles like yours.”

  “How do you know what she looked like, if it was in the olden days?”

  “That’s just what people say, that’s just how the story goes. Anyway, one day Lilac disappeared. A few people said they had heard her talk about going up to the mine, so pretty soon everyone in town was in the mine looking for her. They lowered themselves down in buckets and lit up the whole place with candles. They looked and looked for weeks. But they never found her, not in the mine and not anywhere else.”

  Meg’s dark eyes are candles, too. She speaks as if Lilac Ambrose were her sister.

  “Finally they gave up,” Meg says. “They had to. It wasn’t only sad for Gerald, it was a tragedy for the whole town. Can you imagine? It was just exhausting going about their lives with this big question hanging in the air. So they decided to have a funeral. Of course, there was no body, so they filled the coffin with flowers—little white wildflowers and big white calla lilies. And when they put it in the ground, it was so, so light.”

  There are tears like snail tracks on Meg’s face. Al didn’t notice her start to cry, but here is the evidence. Al pulls Meg toward her and whispers, “What happened to her? Does anyone know? I mean, now?”

  “No. People talk about her, but personally, I think they like keeping it a mystery. My boss, Mr. Twentyman, he’s done a little bit of research. He probably knows as much as anyone. But no one but Lilac knows why she decided to kill herself.”

  “You think she killed herself?”

  Meg looks surprised. “Well, she must have, don’t you think? Look, a miner’s daughter knows how dangerous a place like that is. She didn’t go in there—here—to have a… tea party. But she probably didn’t want to bring shame to her family, so she couldn’t just hang herself.”

  “I can understand that,” Al says. Meg’s body is warm. She’s shaking, and Al holds on tighter.

  “Sometimes I can feel her,” says Meg, looking around the mineshaft. Al squints into the dark corners, as if something will manifest and she will be able to share it with Meg. “I’m not crazy,” she adds. “Everyone says her ghost haunts this place.”

  It’s too cold to have sex, but they do anyway. Not right away, but after they turn off the headlights, after they carve A + M Forever into the rafters with Meg’s car key. This time Al starts things. Last time Meg held Al’s hips above her: move like this, move like this, her fingers said. Now Al pushes Meg’s shoulders against the dirt-rock floor of the mine. Meg breathes in sharply.

  Al works her way down Meg’s ribs to her soft belly, brown-pink dress bunched around her hips like an overripe rose. Al keeps a knee between Meg’s legs, where it’s warm and wet. She’s not exactly sure what to do next, and she hopes Meg’s body will tell her. One of Meg’s garters has already fallen below her knee. Her thighs are big and muscular and shaking.

  “I’ll save you from ghosts,” Al says into her ear. She means it like a promise, but it comes out coy, and Meg makes a gulping noise that could either be a giggle or a half sob.

  Al wants to lean into Meg the way Meg leaned into the road: hard, unflinching. Hands on flexible legs, teeth biting into darkness. There is heat between them; a fire burns in this mountain’s eye. As if Al can create radiance out of friction. As if she can butch away Meg’s worst thing, even as she’s dancing in the wound.

  MORE OF A LEGEND THAN AN ANIMAL

  Felix: Lilac Mines, 2002

  For nearly a month the postcard sits on Felix’s nightstand beneath her F.I.T. application. Every time she sits down to work on the application, she finds herself staring at the postcard. She thinks about New York, about the mountain of rubble in the middle of the city from the day it snowed hot paper ash, and her breath gets caught on her ribcage. She can’t breathe until she reads the postcard again. Just one person lost here, one little story. It’s an innocent and manageable sort of darkness.

  “Where is the mine?” she asks Anna Lisa one morning in mid-October. Felix only has a few weeks left in Lilac Mines, and things between them have been polite and neutral. She accepts this as progress. On Tuesday night Anna Lisa invited Felix to dinner at a vaguely Mexican restaurant with the school secretary and a playground attendant. One woman mentioned her husband, but mostly they gossiped about school.

  Anna Lisa fills Coal’s water bowl. When she puts it down, Coal looks disappointed that it does not contain food.

  “The mine is everywhere,” Anna Lisa says. “All around us.”

  “Do you mean, like, metaphorically?”

  “No, I mean the tunnels run under the entire town. There are a few different entrances, but the main one is at the end of North Main Street. If you follow it up, it turns into a dirt road and then there are some switchbacks and then you’re there.”

  Recently, Anna Lisa has spent most weekends gardening vigorously in the Indian summer heat. She trims the leathery birds of paradise and plants black icicle pansies, delicate goth flowers that she dotes on like a helpless lover. She has gone on one search-and-rescue call this season, bringing water to an ATVer trapped beneath his illegal dune buggy. The man had a cell phone, so it was just rescue, no search. They chugged Crystal Geyser together and waited for the helicopter.

  “Would you take me to the mine?” Felix ventures. “I mean, to the entrance?”

  “I’m kind of busy today,” Anna Lisa says, “really busy, actually. I need to take care of those snails—they’re destroying what’s left of the roses. I want to be prepared when the cold weather sets in.”

  “What if I helped you with that stuff now and then we went to the mine later? We could get the gardening done before it gets hot.”

  “No, that wouldn’t work. Besides, I’ve been up there before. It’s just a hole in a mountain.”

  Voice tight, Felix says, “Okay. Well, I think I’ll go anyway.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  Felix wants bones. An architecture to hang her story on. Bones are truth—they can be broken by sticks and stones and other bones. No one doubts their abilities or their limits. They’re not wobbly like words. So Felix drives as far as she can and parks her dusty car. She puts on her rhinestone-studded, cat-eyed sunglasses and steps, believing, into the bright day.

  Tufts of weedy things and a few scrappy trees partially obscure the mine entrance, but it is definitely here. She steps into the shady hole, which is just wide enough for Felix to lay down in and tall enough to jump up and down, if the mood struck her. It is so dark that Felix’s other senses ramp up, bat-style. She hears the echo of her breath, smells the odor of things that haven’t seen light for a long time: moldering leaves, muddy rocks. She smells her own deodorant, too faux-flowery in this world of real scents. She leans her backpack and lunch against the mine wall and feels the rough timbers shoring up the tunnel, ominous with the
promise of splinters. It is so dark.

  Then Felix remembers she has her sunglasses on. She takes them off and sets them next to her backpack. She blinks. It’s not that dark.

  The tunnel is pockmarked with dynamite holes as thick as a broom handle, as if she’s looking at the mountain’s acne-scarred cheek, the part it hasn’t grown a beard of trees to cover. Shadows shift in front of her. She imagines she hears low, thick breath, but it must be her own. The mine is a Rorschach pattern, ripe for projection.

  She walks further into the mouth. She takes out the small flashlight she borrowed from her car’s emergency kit. But it’s made to illuminate maps or punctured tire tread, not to light up a room. It makes a yellow oval in front of her, but the rest of the mine looks darker as a result, so she clicks it off. She shuffles ahead for a few more feet and then thump: She hits wood. Turning the flashlight back on, she scans a row of boards, nailed to the mine’s support beams from floor to ceiling.

  Now what? she wonders. It makes sense that the mine would be sealed. The town has its ghost; it doesn’t need lawsuits. But somehow she assumed it would be open for her. She also thought there would be some kind of plaque, maybe a box of brochures. She’s glad that there’s not, in a way, but she’s not sure what to do without some kind of guide.

  She sits down and leans against the boards. The seat of her jeans is immediately wet.

  What is she doing here? Lilac isn’t here. Of course Lilac isn’t here. Not her bones, not her presence. Eva isn’t here and Anna Lisa isn’t here and neither are her friends. Just Felix, and the almost-breath noise that she decides must be the hum of the mountain.

  Lilac died here, she thinks. In her neighborhood at home, Felix sometimes sees curbside shrines memorializing deaths she never heard about. Mylar balloons and teddy bears for the little girl killed in a hit-and-run on the corner of Irolo and 8th Street. Poems and Virgen de Guadalupe candles and a jar of pecan cookies for the guy shot on Mariposa. Someone drew a butterfly and the Tasmanian Devil in colored chalk on the sidewalk, but they washed away the first time it rained. Felix hears about these crimes in the aggregate—she hears about gang violence and drunk driving—but the individual victims are always a block away, never anyone she’s seen before.