An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  I rolled my eyes. There was certainly no way to risk pregnancy with Ray short of marrying him. He was celibate outside of wedlock, and I had to respect that. To do so, however, I had to think about other things each time I contemplated the muscular curves at the insides of his wrists, or those smooth, warm spots just below his ears where his throat rose to the firmness of his jaw. His hugs had grown stronger lately, and more lingering, as if to ask a question, but he said nothing and offered nothing. And I waited, my mind and body idling as I tried not to contemplate the enormity of the philosophical stalemate in which we found ourselves. He wanted me to convert to Mormonism and enter his world. I wanted him to step quietly into mine.

  Here I sat, holed up in a library, looking for something to distract my busy little mind from the impossibility of budging this exquisitely faithful man from his rock of family, church, and duty. I stood on a razor’s edge, hungry for him to toss his way of life over for a less certain one with me, and at the same time certain that if he wavered for an instant from the solidity that his church and family represented, I would run screaming for the Colorado border.

  I turned another page in the Great Basin book, and perused an artist’s rendering of a giant ground sloth reared up on hind legs, dining on an extinct tree. What did I see in Ray? Was it just the abnormal closeness spawned from the peculiar circumstances under which we’d met? I had been a murder suspect, and he had been The Law sent to watch me, and before the mess had been unraveled, we had together survived terror. But could we survive normalcy?

  Ray seldom spoke, and yet I read the speech of his body clearly, and I was happier being quiet with him than talking with anyone else. In the world of dating, he was honorable and brave, having traveled four times over the mountains to Colorado to visit me before I committed to visiting him even once.

  I had offered to meet him halfway once, for a camping trip, but he had declined, smiling. “That would be too great a test,” he’d told me.

  “Of your resolve?”

  He’d nodded, even raised his eyebrows impishly while he kept his eyelids bedroom low.

  “I’m quite good at fly fishing,” I’d replied. “And I know how to cook trout over an open fire so you’d thought you’d died and gone to heaven.”

  Here he’d grinned, and closed his eyes. I was supposed to take that to mean that it wasn’t my cooking that tempted him. Oh, well.

  We had been standing beside his vehicle, outside the house where I lived in Boulder, and he had been about to get in that vehicle and drive home to Utah. My landlady’s dog, Stanley, had snorted at us and made us laugh.

  “Come to Utah,” he’d said, and pulled me close and kissed me, a long, searching communication that words cannot approach.

  Wrapped in the protection of his arms and scents, I had found courage and said yes, I’d come. Even then, it had taken me two months of loneliness and a job layoff to climb into my truck and head west. Just past Grand Junction, the brakes had begun to fail, forming a metaphor which scared me witless. Was I plunging into something I could not control? As far as my truck went, it was just overheating caused by worn parts on the parking brake, so after letting things cool off a while, I had continued on, telling myself not to set the brake again. But I had next sat by the road just after a stop for corn chips in Green River, and then again after a similarly unnecessary stop in Price. And then I had dawdled for a full week before taking the truck to be fixed. Was I trying to tell myself something?

  I dreamed briefly of driving that truck further west, over the road into Nevada, if only to get a close-up view into the gaping maw of the open-pit gold mine I had seen that day from the air. Objects like that both drew and repelled me. It had taken the technological prowess of the most advanced culture in history to dig that hole in the ground, and that made me proud; but at the same time, that technological prowess had, in the name of retrieving just a little more gold, made a scar so deep that it could be seen from space. It was even more disquieting to consider that, of all that volume of rock hauled from the bottom of that colossal pockmark, only one part in ten or twenty thousand was in fact the precious metal the miners sought Gold reserves were evaluated in ounces per ton of ore. An ounce per ton was considered high grade, in most cases more than enough to warrant the huge cost of mining and refining. Unimaginable tons of rock usually had to be removed before the veins could be addressed. All that for a hard, shiny bit of metal, or vial of dust, which you could not eat or wrap around you to keep you warm. Gold’s practical uses were few—electronics and dentistry were all I could recall off the top of my head—and beyond that all it was good for was for stacking in vaults to back currency, or draping about peoples’ necks, wrists, fingers, and earlobes to look pretty. And yet people craved it.

  I looked at my own rough hands. No rings. No wedding band, and no fussy old settings handed down from grandma. Somehow my iron-clad sense of practicality had always drawn me to prefer land and a winter’s supply of bacon over gold, but I didn’t have those, either. And now that I thought about it, I really couldn’t understand why people put such faith in the value of gold. What good was it, really? If drought and famine came and I exchanged all my water and grain for a lump of gold, what then would I drink and eat? Why was gold considered worth hoarding, and fighting wars to seize, and for that matter, how was it worth the risk of life and limb it took to mine it, or the gamble of fortunes in technology and land rights and stock dollars to find? And how had the search for just a little bit more of it led to a woman’s death in the empty expanse of the Nevada desert?

  My mind sliding into the comfortable groove of investigation, I put the book I’d been holding back on the shelf and pulled down one that would teach me about the wealth of kings and the dreams of paupers.

  17

  SHIRLEY COOK HEARD HERMIONE’S TOYOTA RATTLE to a stop in front of her house, then heard the door groan open. As was her custom, Hermione did not approach the house. Instead, she waited just outside the gate for an invitation.

  “Oh, come on in,” Shirley growled from the doorway.

  The gate squeaked open and clicked shut, but Hermione made no sound as she came up the gravel walkway. Shirley wanted to curse at this silence. The damned woman even avoids the place where the porch step groans, she thought. Presently she felt Hermione’s presence crowding in near her—and finally smelled the barest hint of the woman’s exhalations curling up against her cheek. “Hello, Shirley,” Hermione said.

  Shirley turned on her heel and led her visitor inside. They had lost Pat, but another was already arising to replace her, and to catch her they would need a good plan.

  STEPHEN GILES WALKED slowly into the central post office in downtown Reno, pausing at the standing desk which held the forms necessary for registering and insuring mail. It was more than an hour past the time when the service windows closed, and he was there to receive rather than send an envelope, but he had chosen this time because there would be very few people moving about among the long aisles of mail-boxes. He riffled through the forms at the standing desk, giving the man who was opening a mailbox near his own time to finish his business and leave. Then he turned toward the long row of boxes, his hand already rising with anticipation, but a short woman who was muttering something about cat food came zipping around the corner, and he pocketed the key. To cover his aborted motions, he walked ten feet beyond his box and stared into another one, pretending to be disappointed to find nothing in it.

  The woman left.

  Stephen hurried to his box—second row from the top, third to the right of the divider—and stabbed in his key. Yes, he could see an envelope in there resting alone in the narrow space, hideously vulnerable to the open back of the mailbox. What if a postal service worker noticed it? he wondered anxiously. Anyone could take it! He struggled to turn his key, his hand tight and clumsy with anxiety. This system has to be changed. I will insist. This is not how it should be done; I’ve told them all along. He snatched the envelope out of the mailbox, slapped
the door shut, and hurried out of the building. What are they thinking of? Surely this system could implicate them just as much as it does me! If they won’t change it, I’ll tell them I will not—Here Stephen’s thoughts ended, because he knew what their answer would be. They would simply find someone else. That must not happen. It was disagreeable to do business with them, but, as he had reassured himself many times, a little more filth was sometimes necessary if one expected to reach an ultimate cleansing.

  It took all of his remaining composure to maintain an ordinary pace as he turned the corner, transited the three blocks to the street where he had left his pathetic car, checked one more time in the reflection of a storefront’s glass to make certain he was not being followed, and climbed in. There he tore the envelope open and hurriedly tugged out the slip of paper inside.

  Something was wrong. It wasn’t . . . he turned the envelope over, read the name and address. They belonged to the holder of the box next to his.

  Stephen thrust the door open, hung his head out the door, and began to vomit.

  A car passing on the street skidded to a stop and the driver jumped out. “Jesus, man!” the man yelled. “You all right? Jane!” he called back to his car. “Phone nine-one-one! This man’s turning blue!”

  Dizzy with fear, Stephen Giles pulled his head back into his car and slammed the door on his would-be savior’s arm. The door bounced open and the man retreated, howling. Stephen slammed the door again, fired the ignition, and accelerated away, clipping the front corner of the Samaritan’s car as he went

  The man roared with pain as his wife scrambled to help him, still clutching her cell phone. “Scratch that ambulance!” he moaned, “Call the police!”

  “They’re coming, dear,” the efficient Jane replied. “And don’t worry, I got his plate number.”

  KYLE CHRISTIE SLOUCHED in the doorway to Virgil Davis’s office, waiting for the superintendent to look up from his work. “What?” Virgil asked, his eyes still firmly on the papers he had laid out in front of him.

  “I can’t find him anywhere,” Kyle said.

  Virgil slammed one hand down on the top of his drafting table, making his mechanical pencils jump. “I haven’t got time to worry about some asshole who gets his truck stuck out there somewheres! I got things—”

  “You know his truck isn’t stuck somewhere.”

  Virgil kept his face bowed toward the table, but shifted his eyes ever so slightly to gauge the other man’s position. “So?”

  “I heard you two yelling last night.”

  “What are you—”

  “I never heard The Don raise his voice before. What’d you say to him to light him up like that?”

  Virgil stiffened, at first surprised to find such shrewdness in a man he’d thought devoid of it. But when he turned his face toward Kyle, his eyes had narrowed into slits and his face was hard with rage.

  Kyle nodded his head contemptuously. “Nice going. Didn’t work out the way you planned, did it? Now what the fuck you going to do?”

  LEFTY LAMORE POURED her fifth cup of strong, black coffee of the day and set it down on her desk. Before sitting down next to it and starting to work, she stretched, rising onto her toes and raising her arms high over her head, waiting for each vertebra to click into place. They revolted most days and tried to stay kinked, but she had learned patience. Besides, this stretching opened up her lungs and forced her to breathe deeply and reminded her to accept, for one more day, that life was fleeting, and to be savored. This mental aspect of her stretching came with difficulty, because it pulled at her scar tissue, reminding her once again that one of her fabulous breasts was gone.

  Satisfied that her vertebral column was now fully aligned, Lefty dropped her arms and sighed, letting out the last great breath with a mixture of resignation and well-chewed irony. Such was typically her mood. She scratched at her still curvaceous, if now somewhat more Rubenesque, body, reached down her shirt front to adjust the prosthesis that filled her left bra cup, and stared out the window for a while at the wide sweep of brown Nevada desert that stretched before her. How she loved this view; empty of all signs of human impact save for the wind sock that stood at the end of the landing strip and the adits that pocked the far mountains. There was no breeze; the wind sock hung limp. Lefty snorted to herself, thinking that it looked about like the dicks of some of last night’s customers must look about now. The fat cat captains of industry that had parked that particular biz jet had come in here last evening looking like a forty-knot wind, but her girls had taken care of that for them. What a bunch of putzes this batch of Johns had been. Giggled like school girls. She’d have to slip the girls a little extra after a gang like this one, maybe fly in a masseuse with sympathetic hands. She leaned over the desk to make herself a note.

  Lefty’s eyes settled to the computer that held the accounting work that awaited her. Business was good here at the Bronco Betty fly-in brothel, one more fact that said that she shouldn’t service the men herself anymore. Her cancer surgery scar was a turn-off to most of them anyway, and with those who found it titillating, the accounting work meant that she was not financially compelled to do business. She had thus afforded herself the luxury of an early retirement to madam-only status.

  Lefty now sat down and typed her password into the computer. The hard drive hummed and grunted as it did her bidding, bringing up the information for Granville Resources. She sighed again. She had put off reconciling this account, because there was something a little odd about it, and that bothered her. “Okay now, old girl,” she told herself firmly, “you’ve procrastinated as long as you could. You’ve given it your best time slot—everyone’s napping, no one’s bugging you—so now crack this little eggy, okay?”

  She moved through the database, checking and rechecking the numbers for expenses and payroll at the Gloriana Mine. Next she worked back through the corporate picture, rechecking everything for operations in the conterminous forty-eight of the United States of America. It all checked and tallied, so why was she hesitating to send in her monthly report?

  She liked having this account. It was fat and juicy, and Chittenden, the corporate big-wig who had brought it to her, had been a lot of fun. He’d told her he wanted an outside eye on his numbers. A former pilot with the British navy, he had flown in here alone at the controls of the corporate jet and set up the account himself, grabbing a little partying on the side, and it had been a good party, lots of laughs and slap and tickle over the excellent single-malt Scotch he had brought with him from a stopover in Canada. He had tried to take the half-full bottle with him when he left, the cheapskate, but she had closed her hand firmly around its neck. It wasn’t smuggling if she didn’t declare it, was it? She smiled acerbically to herself, thinking that this wasn’t the first time in her career that she had disagreed with the hypocritical crap some men upheld as laws, when they weren’t busy breaking them.

  Lefty laughed again, remembering the hilarity that had followed when Chittenden had knelt on the bearskin rug in front of the black leather couch here in her office, the better to arrange along her thigh a row of crackers encrusted with caviar and choice cold cuts that he had produced from the refrigerator in his jet. It had been a hot afternoon like this one, and she’d been wearing the same shorts she had on today. He had begun to nibble at those expensive little canapes, working his rather pointy nose like a mouse, and when he got to the fourth one, he had asked, “So tell me, fair maiden, does my contract allow for a little hide-the-salami on the side?”

  “No,” Lefty had replied, feeling the brashness of her Scotch and damned sick of men who wanted freebies, “but you can hold my breast any time you want.”

  “Only one?’ he had asked.

  She had looked down into his mischievous smile and had said, “Yeah, ‘cause only one comes off!” and had yanked the prosthesis out and clouted him over the head with it. God bless him, he had shrieked with delight and caught it over-hand, then rolled around on the rug cuddling the gelatinous t
hing and cooing as delightedly as he would if it had been the real item, and had said, “So that’s why they call you Lefty!”

  You Brits aren’t the sissies you seem, she had decided, and had almost given him some anyway, but even though it had been three years since her surgery, die still didn’t feel like doing it for recreation.

  Lefty shifted her mind from that memory back onto her computer screen, where, with die looseness that comes with humor, she began at last to discern the pattern that had troubled her. She reached instantly for the phone, ready to report it to Chittenden, but then stopped, her hand hovering over the instrument.

  She withdrew her hand, thought things through. Even with this irregularity, the numbers did tally, so she had a choice. She could telephone Chittenden, or simply send in her report as usual and let his inside accountants find it themselves. “Yes,” she said out loud to herself. “That might be a really good idea, because if I report this directly to Mr. Pommy, then he’ll know sooner, but he will also know that I know, and that might just put me in a bad position.”

  Lefty rose from her desk and walked past the black leather couch to the enormous window that looked out across the fantastic sweep of the northern Nevada landscape. Fighting to quell the small voice inside her that abhorred the kind of mucking around that she had just discovered, she said, “Just remember, Lefty, nobody knows the misery of a bad position like an old whore.”

  UMBERTO RODRIGUEZ PULLED his metal-flake gold four-by-four up to the pump and set the gas running into the tank. Then he strutted over to the pay phone near the curb, the late afternoon sunlight reflecting smartly off his mirrored sun-glasses. When the line connected, he said, “Morgan Shumway, por favor.”