An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  He lifted his eyes to a luridly-colored cross-stitched sampler his third wife had made for him just before she gave up and filed for a divorce on the grounds that they never saw each other anyway, so why not make it official? The sampler read, in Gothic type: FAST, ACCURATE, CHEAP; CHOOSE ANY TWO. Marilyn had understood him, he thought dolefully. He shouldn’t have let her get away. God knew he could finesse only two out of three where it came to mining gold.

  Mining. The image of Gabby Hayes flooded his mind, playing the canny, presumptuously optimistic old prospector with the bullet hole through his hat brim and his sleepy burro trailing along behind him carrying the gold pan and pickaxe. The term “prospector” conjured a semi-perjorative image for some mining professionals: uneducated, limited in his means, growing older and more grizzled by the minute, foolishly throwing his life away for a dream of riches. The modern, university-educated gold-seeker preferred to be called a geologist or engineer, depending on his training and his task. Or her training and task. The world had changed since Virgil’s early days in the industry. It took all kinds of people with all kinds of talents to do a job as complex as mining, and some of them these days were female. Here he sat, devoting his life to the quest for gold, doing his own piece of the job in his own way. He was not an optimist. He was a pessimist, but that was a good thing. I am a pessimist because I understand risk, he told himself, and understanding risk means I can keep people as safe as possible while they mine the gold that others have found. Others. Optimists like Donald Paul MacCallum.

  Virgil realigned his mechanical pencil with the edge of his pad of lined yellow paper, savoring the ritual with the defensive satisfaction that went with his refusal to commit his records directly into the state-of-the-art computer which sat behind him on his seldom-used desk. He begrudged computers. He was a staggering analog dinosaur in the land of fleet-footed digital mammals. Two jobs and eight years earlier, when a computer had first appeared on his desk, he had gritted his teeth and learned to work with it, because otherwise, he knew, he would quickly fall by the wayside, old and anachronistic at fifty. But he didn’t have to devote himself to the damned machines, or give them his innermost thoughts.

  His thoughts flicked painfully back to the subject of the new project, and from there, inevitably to MacCallum, and to the way their confrontation of the day before had gone. The application for Phase I drilling was hopelessly bogged down, and he had to have a map from MacCallum to apply for permitting for Phase n. Any fool could see that. Bile rose again to his throat at the memory of how, when he asked for that map, MacCallum had perched languidly on the drafting stool—the very one on which Virgil now sat—and had cocked his head back in thought, as if schedules and the requirement that they make a goddamn profit were new concepts to him. What in hell’s name had Chittenden been thinking of, sticking him with a clown like MacCallum to head up exploration?

  Virgil shuddered slightly at the memory of their first meeting two years before, at Granville’s corporate headquarters. Virgil had arrived straight off a plane from South Africa, where he’d been bridging a gap in his personal cash flow with a pick-up consulting job on the exploitation of a buried placer. He’d been jet-lagged and needed a shower and a good night’s sleep between clean sheets. But stateside jobs were devilishly hard to come by these days, and the foreigners had all gotten smart and sent their own sons to American schools and taken over the overseas mining industry, and it was only because Granville had an ambitious new president that this job had opened up. So he hadn’t dared keep his new employers waiting. Instead, he had pulled a clean shirt, a necktie, and a slightly creased suit jacket out of his luggage during the cab ride in from the airport and had dodged off the elevator and into the men’s room a floor below Granville’s offices and done his best to freshen up at the sink. It was a nice tie. Gwen, his first wife, had given it to him. Or had it been Ramona, his second wife? Anyway, he’d washed his face and armpits and had put on the clean shirt and stuffed the dirty one down between his passport and the foreign issue of Time magazine in his attache. Then he’d plastered down his thinning grey hair with a comb and water, and had forced himself to brace his shoulders and stand up straight. Peering at himself in the mirror, he had worried about the pouchiness of the skin around his eyes, and had tried in vain to condense it with a compress of cold water applied with a paper towel from the dispenser, but had given up, because time was ticking by. All this had been a Herculean effort as tired as he was, but that’s what you did if you wanted to stay at the top of this profession, or in it, for that matter. And then he’d gotten back onto the elevator and gone up the one last floor and had cleared his mind as best he could and tried to look cool and purposeful as he strode into the president’s office . . . and there next to the president’s desk had been Donald Paul MacCallum. In field boots, a stained T-shirt, frayed blue jeans, and ten days’ growth of beard, lounging on a soft leather chair with one goddamn leg slung over the arm, for crissake. MacCallum had hardly acknowledged his arrival, so busy had he been laughing and telling jokes. Like he was at a fucking barbecue or something, swapping lies with his neighbor over Budweisers. And the president, in his pin-striped three-piece Saville Row suit, had thought MacCallum brilliant. Until his dying day Virgil would think that he had hallucinated that scene.

  At length, the president, Roderick James Adrian Chittenden, had turned to him and said, “Ah, Virgil Davis, isn’t it? How was your flight? You look beat, man. Why didn’t you stop at a hotel and get rested before coming in?”

  The room had begun to sway underneath Virgil’s exhausted legs. Virgil had tried to focus on MacCallum as a way of shocking himself awake, but what he saw was a man who appeared as relaxed as if God had made his backbone of jelly.

  Chittenden had turned back to MacCallum and said, “Don, this is Virgil Davis, the man who’s going to scrabble your gold out of the ground.”

  “Glad to meetcha,” MacCallum had said jovially.

  His beaming countenance still aimed toward MacCallum, the president had pronounced, “And Virgil, this is Don MacCallum, the man who’s going to find even more of that good stuff!”

  MacCallum had laughed uproariously, even slapped his knee with merriment.

  “And this is Kyle Christie,” Chittenden had continued, gesturing toward a tall, blondish man who stood blending in with the curtains to MacCallum’s right. “He works with MacCallum.”

  Kyle had extended a limp hand with all the affect of a dog rolling over to show another its belly, a look of acquiescence rounding his oatmeal-soft face. Virgil’s heart had sunk. If this was what Granville had for a project-generation team, he gave his tenure at the company about six months.

  But Chittenden had a grand scheme: Having now charged Virgil with the task of transforming MacCallum’s discovery into an efficient, state-of-the-art mine, he had formed a limited partnership and bought a bucketful of old lease-hold corporations—faded hopefuls bristling with derelict claims that had closed down in the 1930’s—for pennies on the dollar. Most such acquisitions involved only producing reserves, but Chittenden had slapped his investors on the back and rubbed his hands with glee and insisted that, just as he had done at Gloriana, MacCallum would again find reserves just a little bit deeper than the places where prospectors and miners of the 1930s—the last brief gold rush in the area—had given up and stopped digging. If MacCallum could do it once, he told them, he could do it again. Gold which the technology of the 1930’s had missed, that was his target. “It will be another Carlin trend,” Chittenden told his investors, pointing on the map to the line of immense open-pit operations a hundred miles to the east. “Except that, unlike the Carlin trend, the ore will be higher grade, like the Gloriana . . . a line of riches such as Nevada has never seen!”

  Virgil didn’t need a geologist like MacCallum or Christie or anyone else to explain to him that Chittenden had been talking blue sky to the investors. The Carlin trend was half a state away, a completely different mineral province. They might find
some kind of trend here, but it would be fundamentally different mineralogically, and require as always a unique system of mining and milling to extract it from the ground. That was where his years of experience and own brand of creativity would shine. And he knew that such ventures were risky. He knew that Chittenden’s bluster had been based on his need to loosen dollars from the investors’ hands, but at the same time, he dearly hoped that the plan would work. It was optimistic, and optimism was the very heart of exploration.

  And MacCallum had found something, he was sure, even though the bastard was playing it tight on him; something at least worth taking to the next level, exploratory drilling. But the permitting process had suddenly grown difficult, with this damned save-the-desert gang pissing and moaning to the BLM.

  Virgil stared out the window over a line of moveable metal storage sheds at the view beyond. From his perch here at the Gloriana Mine, high on the flanks of the Eugene Mountains, he enjoyed a panoramic view of the Majubas, the Antelope Range, the Jackson Mountains, and the Kamma Mountains beyond them. Or would enjoy the view, if his heart had been capable of feeling joy. Today, he was so exhausted from worry that his eyes dropped from the panorama to one of the metal sheds, to the spot where someone had left the bar that latched the heavy, double-hung doors ten degrees askew. Such untidiness irritated him beyond words. It was the kind of sloth MacCallum would thrive in. Geologists were half crazy, or totally so. He was sure of it.

  A few hundred feet beyond the row of metal sheds, outside the eight-foot chain link security fence with razor wire he had erected, stood the trailer in which the biologists from Intermontane Biological Consultants now lurked. This trailer had been Virgil’s embryonic field office. Trouble with the save-the-desert crazies had started almost as soon as he had set that trailer on the site. Trouble. And not just the nightmares that had robbed his sleep—ghastly images of the bodies Of miners crushed under countless tons of rock, of his own body pinned and dying—but the daytime events that helped fuel them. Like that woman with the ruined face, who had come with those Paiute women who burned bundles of sage. The Paiute had told him, “If you want the nightmares to stop, you’ll move.”

  How had she known about those dreams?

  The two women had carried on like that for days, and two women had become ten, and then twenty, as the tree-huggers in Volvos with the long skirts and beauty-shop hair had streamed in from California to help them badger him.

  Finally, in desperation, he had stormed out there and said, “Just where in hell do you think I should move to?”

  The Paiute had taken him aside and said, “About eight hundred feet north. Move your mill and office, and the decline.”

  “The decline?” he had roared, flabbergasted that this woman even knew this term. “You mean my main tunnel? You been down at the BLM looking at my maps?”

  “Yes. Move them north eight hundred feet. It’s better rock, anyway,” she had said softly. “It might save you.”

  So he had filed new plans with the BLM, moving the siting of the offices and mill eight hundred feet north. Then, weirdly, the women had left, and had not come back. But still the dreams came, until one day he had seen the Paiute woman in town. “You said the dreams would stop.”

  “Did you move the decline?”

  “We haven’t even started digging yet!” he had said, feeling ashamed and foolish. The fact was that, now that they were gone, he had figured to sink the decline in the original position.

  Without blinking, she had said, “You must learn to thank the Spirit for everything She gives you. Thank Her for not throwing Her rocks on top of you. Thank Her for that food in your stomach. Think of every speck of it as the gold you work so hard to get Then the dreams will stop.”

  Virgil had recoiled from her words. They had reminded him too much of his Catholic boyhood, of a nun who had twisted his ear as she said, “If you touch a woman in anger or even just take her for granted, you are a rapist.”

  But, to keep the women from returning, he had moved the buildings and the portal so that the project could move forward. And, being at depth a superstitious man, he had begun to take the Indian’s suggestion. Each time, before he stepped down into that portal, he had stopped and said a prayer, touching the rock with kindness and respect, humbling himself before the earth.

  The dreams had stopped.

  Moving the decline had required a slight deviation in the plan, but in fact the cost had been lower, because she had been right; the rock was better there, and excavation had gone more quickly.

  Then that damned mouse had shown up in Pat Gilmore’s survey. Now, the sad-faced shithead at the BLM was getting letters threatening lawsuits if the new project proceeded. At least the women had not come back here. And if they did come again, they would now be confronted by a chain link fence and security personnel. Virgil shook his head, still trying to understand what difference eight hundred feet could make. The irony was that he had chosen that original location for the portal because that ground was already disturbed from previous rounds of mining fifty or one hundred years before.

  At least the nightmares had ended. The memory of what they had been like now hung about him like the haze of range fire smoke that still assaulted his sinuses. Virgil wondered sourly if MacCallum ever suffered such dreams. He ran his hands feverishly through his stubbly hair. Geologists were definitely insane. Damn MacCallum for his insanity.

  He stood up to stretch his husky frame and wandered down the hallway into the common area where the employees got their coffee. He stared into MacCallum’s mailbox, wincing as if the man might be in there ready to laugh at him again, but there was nothing there but an old newsletter from the Geological Society of Nevada. He pulled it out and read it. It was folded open to a running series of jokes entitled, “The Great Basin Experience.”

  “You might be a geologist,” it began, “if you have worked in more countries than United Airlines flies to.” Another said, “You might be a geologist if your spouse mows the lawn.” And another, “If you have done a rollover from a 401K to your IRA more than once.”

  Virgil stuffed the newsletter back into the box with disgust. The damned geologists couldn’t even tell themselves from mine superintendants. He wanted to add: “And if you’ve got so many ex-wives you’re paying out in alimony more than you make.” He pulled the newsletter back out of the box just to make certain that line wasn’t already there. Another read, “If you don’t know where you’ll be tomorrow.” Another, “If you get laid off almost every Christmas.”

  Virgil threw the newsletter into the trash, grabbed his fifth cup of coffee of the day, stalked back into his office, and slammed the door behind him.

  As he settled back onto his drafting stool, another ore truck shook Virgil’s table as it trundled by on the haulage road, another truck filled to the brim with his very highest grade ore. At the rate they were blasting here at the mine, they’d strip this site of its high-grade inside of a year, or at most, two. Then, either the price of gold would have to rise high enough to support production of lower grades—an event on the scale of pigs sprouting wings—or he’d have to find some new way of cutting his already excruciatingly tight costs—something like pigs inventing rocket ships. He needed a new hole to be digging or he’d soon find himself back on a plane to another banana republic preparing himself to fight some South African for the honor of absorbing daily doses of humidity, pidgin English, and anti-malarial drugs. Goddamn MacCallum, who would not cough up his assay results for Phase n, and double Goddamn Kyle Christie, who sat around in plain sight doing nothing while his fat salary and motel and car rental bills burned up the company’s remaining profit margin. Why couldn’t they just get on with it, and cough up another map? The permitting process was slow enough as it was, and the drilling would take months, even years, and perhaps hundreds of holes, if they were going to hope to find whatever was out there. They needed to get on with it!

  A gentle tap at the door lifted him from the thin edges of despair
back to present time and space. “Come in,” he barked, trying to sound busier than he was.

  The door opened. A fluff of wheat-blonde hair edged around it, and Laurel Dietz’s blue blue eyes and unassuming smile brightened the room.

  Virgil’s heart constricted with the sudden pain of feeling something other than bewilderment and anger. God keep me here at home. God spare me from staring into another sea of brown eyes.

  Laurel said, “Hiya, Virgil. I got the new samples all prepped and ready for shipment to the lab. Shall I load them onto the truck?”

  Virgil might not ever get used to having women in a mine, but as long as they were here, he wished he had another twelve like her. Bright, able, quick, and sweet. “No, get one of those lazy boys out there to do that for you,” he ordered.

  Laurel’s eyes widened, her way of indicating that something was funny. “That’s sexist, Virgil. I got muscles.” She yanked up one sleeve of her T-shirt and crooked a slender arm into a lampoon of a weight-lifter’s pose.

  “Aw, Laurel,” Virgil murmured. He reached out one thick hand, hesitated a moment, then pulled it back. Her flaxen hair looked so soft and silky. Every time he saw her, he itched to touch it. He told himself it was because she wore it short and kind of messy, like his daughter did. Wendy would be about Laurel’s age, wouldn’t she? Yes, that was it, of course. He’d have to remember to write to Wendy, if he could find her address