An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  But, like a food junkie trying to give up chocolate, I decided to leave civilization by way of the road on which Pat Gilmore had died. I told myself that, like Weebe, I probably wouldn’t spot the place where she had crashed, and that I was only going there so that I could see what was left of the desert after the intense burn that had roared over it like a blackening storm. So off I went, taking the interstate back east eight or ten miles and then turning off on the dirt road in question.

  The landscape was indeed black. I had expected to see burned vegetation, but was not prepared to find that even the earth was burned. The silty clay soils laid down as Ice Age lake beds and dried hard through the millennia were blackened, scorched by the heat and coated with what I presumed to be burned resins from the sage brush. The brush itself was reduced to bare nubs sticking up from the ground, and the grasses were gone entirely. Not a creature stirred; no bird flew overhead, no insect scraped across the barren ground. I felt nauseated. I may as well have been on the moon.

  And I had no trouble finding the spot where Pat Gilmore had hit the bank. It was a long road, but there weren’t many curves, and there were fewer with sufficiently high banks to flip a truck. As typically happens with such dirt roads that are heavily maintained by graders, the blade had, over time, cut farther and farther down into the soil and kicked up a higher and higher bank beyond a wide, shallow ditch. The road was washboarded and not lacking in chuck holes, the very problem the grader repeatedly tried to solve. The place was wide open and lonesome. Standing in the bed of my truck, I could see a hundred miles, and the only other vehicles I saw moving were ten or fifteen miles east on the interstate. I could see how easily Pat might have lost control of her truck and hit the bank. And, judging by the curve of the bank and the length of the gouge inscribed by the edge of the front bumper, I determined that the bank had caught the front end of the truck and guided it up and over into a flip.

  I got out and wandered along the ditch and around through the remnants of sage that stood above the bank. I found no footprints. The men who had come to retrieve the burned-out truck had not left the road. I moved farther and farther out from the impact site, cutting wider and wider arcs through the baked ground. And found the missing spare tire.

  I knelt down and inspected the remnants of steel belting that emanated from the roasted hulk. They matched the other three on Pat’s truck, and the rim looked right, too. I felt all the way around it, and found no bullet dings. Weebe’s theory, like nothing else in sight, was all wet.

  I sat back on my haunches and had a good laugh at myself. Pat Gilmore had not been murdered, she had simply hit the bank, like Sheriff Obernick had said. The force of impact had launched the spare tire out of the bed of the truck. I had carried spares loose like that myself. Perhaps the truck had even struck a bit of flint, and sparked the fire. I had simply drawn the wrong conclusion from fragmental evidence. I laughed so hard I cried. I stood up and danced, I whooped, I howled. If I could be so wrong, then all things were possible in my world.

  THE DESERT LAY before me. I picked another dirt road at random and drove around the south end of the Majuba Mountains through Poker Brown Gap. My goal was the mountains and valleys that lay to the northwest, and the spur of the emigrant trail which had been blazed to avoid the dreaded Forty Mile Desert I had read more on the Forty Mile Desert the evening before as the sun sank toward the western horizon, turning the pages of one of the local history books I had purchased in Battle Mountain.

  The book contained an excerpt from a diary kept by a woman named Sarah Royce, who with her husband and two-year-old child had joined a wagon train which traveled over the Emigrant Trail late in the summer of 1849, the year the California Gold Rush fanned the sparks of emigration into a raging fire. Her party missed the turn to the meadows just southwest of Lovelock where emigrants fed and rested their oxen before attempting the Forty Mile Desert. They found not restful meadows, but instead a broad, lifeless pan of salt where the great rivers had died under the fire of the desert sun, a place of mirages, abandoned wagons, dead cattle, and lost dreams. She described the horror of having to retrace fifteen precious miles to gain the meadow. Fearful that they might be trapped like the Donner party if they didn’t make the high passes of the Sierra before the snows fell, they waited only two days before again setting forth. A few miles onward, as she lay in the bed of her wagon to shelter her child, she heard her husband bid farewell to one of their two oxen as it fell dead in its harness. She stepped out of that wagon and proceeded to walk, ranging miles out in front of her party, leading them toward their goal through sheer will and prayer.

  With Ian and Tom, I had crossed the Forty Mile Desert along Interstate 80 from Reno to Lovelock in just over half an hour, but now that I’d read Sarah Royce’s diary I felt that slicing through it again on a high-speed highway might somehow denigrate her experience of crossing it on foot. I decided that a visit to the alternate route, blazed by those who had hoped to bypass that desert but had instead found another and had annoyed Indians as well, might better fit my current mood. Sarah Royce’s experience had seemed uncannily familiar. Perhaps through her eyes and words, I had begun to perceive my own terror that, if I walked the metaphorical trail that lay before me, I might in some way perish. Ray had made his offer only three days earlier, but already his well-charted life felt lost somewhere behind me, like a missed meadow. I wondered if, even now, I could turn back and find him waiting, hard to find, but still there. Yet the thirsts of my spirit moved me onward toward . . . I was not sure what. I preferred the unknown to the uncertain. Perhaps I was searching for Liberty, the woman of the West, who strode fiercely from a sunburst of gold.

  As I crested a rise that opened out into a flat valley between two lines of brown hills, I wondered if such hungers of the soul had lain at the center of the dreams that had moved children of the eastern forests and prairies to venture west along this trail. A century and a half earlier, the frontier had called men and women outward. I was traveling inward. I laughed dryly, trying to pretend for just one more day that my journey followed a physical trail where, having grown up in the arid lands, I stood a better than average chance of survival. I did not wish to contemplate the fear that Sarah Royce’s story had touched in me. Like her, I faced my desert with inadequate tools and knowledge. Little had lain between her frail success and die failures of countless others. At the Frontier, there are no guarantees.

  26

  LAUREL DIETZ PULLED HER RED CHEVY BLAZER TO a stop just below the adit that had caught her attention. She set the parking brake with quick efficiency, picked up her day pack and rock hammer, got out, and hurried up the slope to the breach in its dry curves formed by the gaping hole and the mound of spoils just below it. She scanned the low shrubs of rabbit brush and the scraggly sage for the telltale tags she had learned would mean that MacCallum had sampled this position during his exploration. She was getting good at re-tracing his steps. This was a time-consuming and tedious pain in the neck, but it was necessary if she was going to reconstruct his database. With detached admiration, she thought again how crafty he had been in scrambling his records to prevent anyone else from interpreting them.

  As she neared the adit, Laurel saw what she was looking for: a metallic tag hanging from a clump of sage, MacCallum’s mark. It was right at the brink of the hole some old prospector had bashed into the hillside. Just as with about every second sample she had relocated, he had re-sampled an existing adit.

  She admired that It was a deceptively simple plan. Do what everyone else has done, but do it better, with broader knowledge and superior vision. And do it with a bigger exploration budget, so you can assay a hundred times as many locations in a fraction of the time, and then you can see the really big picture, a new picture, one no one else has had a chance to see.

  Laurel glanced over her shoulder to the east, down the flank of the mountain, toward *he graded road that ran up the valley. Kyle Christie’s vehicle sat by the side of that road, right where it h
ad been for the last hour. She could just make out the lazy hulk that was Kyle himself, lolling in the slim shade his vehicle afforded. What a joke that he still came out here, pretending to be working. The whole field office knew what a goof-off he was. But in fact, it was convenient that he was lazy. It made her plan easier.

  Kyle had either not noticed her or had decided not to follow her. That was good. It would be hard to explain why she was spending her time off running around the Kamma Mountains. She did not want anyone asking such questions until she was ready.

  When she reached the metallic tag, Laurel pulled out her notebook, jotted down its number, then marked its location on her map.

  She had to hand it to MacCallum. Retracing his steps was a great education. Until now, she had thought him simply lucky, or at best an idiot savant. He certainly laughed like an idiot. But no, he was smart, very smart. She would use his tricks herself again in the future, once she had finished supplanting him as company wizard.

  STEPHEN GILES SAT at his desk at the BLM office in Reno, his eyes glazed. The phone on that desk was ringing, but he did not answer it. He did not hear it. He did not notice the room around him.

  For each of the last four evenings, he had gone to the downtown post office in search of the letter he had expected to receive, but there had been nothing in his box each time. No envelope. No check.

  Without that check, no trip with wonderful new luggage and clothes. No precious moment of release into the world he knew was his, if he could only get there.

  And after everything he had done to earn that money. He thought briefly of lifting the receiver of the telephone that sat before him and exposing the double-crossing sadists for the crimes they were committing, but knew that no one would suffer more than he if he did so.

  Instead, he bent his head and wept.

  KYLE CHRISTIE SAT in the shade of his vehicle, sipping at a bottle of Gatorade. It was the sixth day now since The Don had disappeared without a trace. He had now called die rental car agency in Reno, to see if MacCallum had turned in his vehicle in preparation for flying somewhere—who knew? Tahiti? Afghanistan?—but no dice. His account was still active. No one at the mine had heard from him, and he’d gotten the same story at the head office. He was almost ready to phone Gretchen.

  Kyle surveyed the range of mountains that stretched before him. He could still feel the presence of MacCallum, just as if he’d seen him an instant before, laughing as he loaded up the day’s samples. It was not the first time he had known MacCallum to wander off on his own, but this time, he wondered grimly if his old partner was just trying to get rid of him.

  Kyle glanced to the west, up into the south end of the Kamma Mountains. He could see a red four-by-four moving around up there. He knew that it belonged to Laurel Dietz. He scratched absentmindedly at his balls. Laurel was kind of cute, but she didn’t quite do it for him. Nothing. Zero. No fizz in the beer. That was too bad, because she was handy, and it had been a long time since Kyle had gotten any.

  Laurel had, for some reason Kyle could not quite discern, taken to doing field work. She was supposed to work only in the mine, marking the working faces of the stopes for assay and tracking the results through the computer. Suddenly, he began to worry. Was there something Chittenden had not told him?

  He turned his gaze back to the south, the better to forget, for another minute or two, that the years were dribbling by, and that he didn’t have much to show for them, and that, if MacCallum did not return, his professional goose was as good as cooked.

  He swatted at a grasshopper that had found its way onto his knee.

  Far away the first faint vibrations of an approaching engine caught his attention. He looked again to the south, down past the point where the faint traces of the Applegate-Lassen Spur of the Emigrant Trail crossed the wider, graded Seven Troughs Road next to which he sat. Yes, it was a pickup truck, he could see it now, coming his way. He watched it, thankful for something to watch. It rolled along at a healthy, yet conservative clip, kicking up a plume of silt that hung in the quiet air. The truck grew and grew, rumbling up the road toward him, until it was now only a half mile distant, now a quarter mile. As it hove even closer, he saw that the truck was very old, and noticed that it had out-of-state plates.

  27

  IN THE MIDDLE OF A BROAD, DRY VALLEY, I PULLED over to ask directions of a man who was, for some reason, sitting beside his vehicle doing nothing. I leaned out the window. “Was that the Applegate-Lassen Spur back there?” I asked, pointing to a faint crossroads a half mile back.

  “Yeah,” he said. “There’s a sign there made out of a chunk of old railroad track.”

  “Thanks. Can I get over to Rabbithole Springs over that route in a truck like this? I don’t have four-wheel drive.”

  “Maybe. There’s a washed-out bit down around the south end of the Kamma Mountains there.” He stood up, sauntered over to the truck, and leaned on it, giving me a witless smile. “You an experienced off-road driver?” he asked. He was tall and had fading blonde hair and deep sun-creases in his face. He looked about Tom Latimer’s vintage.

  “Yeah.”

  “Out joy riding?” he asked, making conversation.

  “Just driving.”

  “Where ya headed?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Not sure. Just goin’.” I pulled in my elbow and reached for the ignition.

  The man said quickly, “I’m doing some minerals exploration around there. I was about to head that way, if you’d like to follow along.” He shrugged, kind of a “I’m just a goof, don’t take me seriously” gesture. “Then if you get stuck, I can give you a hand. If you want.”

  “Okay,” I said, starting to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” He looked a little annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that it figures: I’m a geologist. I drive out into a place where there’s probably only one biped per hundred square miles, and what do I find? Another geologist.”

  The man grinned sloppily. “Hey, cool. I’m Kyle Christie,” he said, offering me a hand to shake.

  A nervous tightness whipped through my body. Not only do I find another geologist, but he’s Don MacCallum’s exploration partner. “Glad to meet you, Kyle,” I said, shaking his hand. I almost asked after MacCallum, but decided that surely by now he had shown up again. Maybe he was right down the road at Rabbithole Springs, and I might meet him. The idea really bouyed me up.

  Kyle’s grin spread. “Yeah, there’s one for the GSN newsletter,” he said. “If you’re in the back of beyond and you meet another human being, you might both be geologists.”

  I narrowed my eyes in confusion.

  “Oh,” he said. “Maybe you don’t get that newsletter.”

  “No, I don’t. GSN?”

  “Geological Society of Nevada. You got a name?” he asked cheekily.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sorry; forgot to say. I’m Em Hansen.”

  OKAY, I KNEW that Kyle Christie wasn’t just doing me a favor in showing me the road, but he looked harmless enough. He looked like your typical field geologist, all faded blue jeans and tattered Filson mapping vest, and like his Geological Society of Nevada newsletters would suggest, “You might be a geologist if at parties you admire your friends’ gold chains around their necks, and they quietly observe your hand lens rope,” and, “If your baseball cap has the logo of a company that’s no longer in business,” and, “If people comment on your sagebrush cologne.”

  At any rate, we would be traveling in separate vehicles, and I figured that somewhere along the fine I could pump a little information out of him and report it back to Tom. So Kyle led the way back down the road toward the pair of faint tracks that turned off, and bounced and wiggled and teetered over the miles that led toward the Rabbithole, which was a fairly large spring a few miles away. It turned out to be some-thing of a gathering place, or as much as one might expect to find in the middle of the desert. Two young men in a tarted-up Jeep Wagoneer were just loading up as we
arrived* having apparently finished a picnic that featured beer and deli sandwiches. “And I thought my vehicle was dusty,” I commented to them, pointing to the fine tawny silt that was caked all along the sides and wheel wells of the beetle-black Jeep.

  “Just came across the Black Rock,” one of them said, in a voice that told me that he thought he was an incredibly cool dude. He pointed over his shoulder to the west, where the valley we were in appeared to open up downhill into another one of the broad basins that lay between Nevada’s ranges. His companion finished his beer, belched, crumpled the can against his forehead, and pitched it into the rabbit brush.

  Now, that pissed me off. I was out here to find enough emptiness that I could fill myself with solitude, and these guys had to go and throw a beer can into it. “Well, have a nice day,” I said cheerily, and even waved, doing my most subtle impression of a dork. “But, um, you forgot this,” I said, and, stooping primly, picked up the beer can and handed it back to them. I would not have dared do that if a tall man who was obviously trying to make an impression on me had not been standing right next to me. In sudden afterthought, I glanced toward Kyle, making certain that I had not just signed my own death warrant. His mouth had sagged open. My heart sank.

  The man at the wheel of the Jeep said, “Fuck you,” slapped it in gear, and scrubbed out onto the road. A hundred yards up, his companion once again threw the beer can out into the brush.