An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  Virgil’s eyes narrowed as he reached down and turned the engine back on. He whipped the tractor around and fed it back into the main decline, and we jolted on down, sinking ever deeper into the earth.

  A few minutes later, he turned into another side tunnel. Virgil parked the machine and we got out and turned the corner toward the working face. All around me, there were large metal straps bolted into the walls and ceiling. “What are those?” I asked.

  “Rock bolts,” Virgil shouting to be heard over the increased thundering as we neared the working drill. “We’re in the vein now. This rock’s unstable. The main decline runs through the competent rock. We only cross-cut into the vein where we have to. As the miner proceeds, he sets these straps and bolts to keep the back up. The bolts go way into the rock. Here’s one that hasn’t been set yet.” He picked up an iron rod that was longer than he was tall.

  The solid metal suddenly seemed puny as I considered the stresses that were being released all around me. I tensed further, recalling the stories in my college classes about rocks literally exploding as the pressures of adjacent volumes were removed.

  We trudged up the stope, soon reaching a place where there were no confining straps of metal and rock bolts. The rock stuck out in jagged slabs. It was like walking into the mouth of a shark.

  “Watch your footing, and don’t bump your head,” Virgil said. “In fact, you’d probably better wait back by the turn there. This part has just been blasted. Larry hasn’t barred down the loose ore or set the rock bolts yet.”

  “I hear someone working up there,” I said.

  Virgil heard it, too. The sound of metal against rock. “Larry!” he shouted. “Is that you?”

  The noise stopped.

  A man in miner’s garb stepped around the corner where we could see him. He was alone. He was holding a long iron bar.

  “MacCallum?” shouted Virgil.

  The man did not reply. But as we stepped closer, we could see that it was indeed Donald Paul MacCallum. Instead of looking startled, he grinned sloppily, a kind of welcome-to-the-party smile. But he still held the bar. I stopped where I was, out of range if he decided to use it as a weapon.

  Virgil’s shoulders sagged. “All the time, you’ve been down here?”

  MacCallum’s smile faded slightly, but he laughed, an almost-giggle. “Aw, hell, Virgil, sometimes you gotta get off and let the world turn around a few times without you.”

  Virgil collapsed against the wall of the stope. “All these days, I’ve been—” He clutched at his chest. I watched him closely. Confronted with a man who had hideously inconvenienced him for days and perhaps months, he had fallen back rather than storming towards him. “I thought you were dead,” he said, pain tightening his voice. Then suddenly rage took over, and he began to shout “How in hell did you do this? My people have been down here every day! No one’s told me anything!”

  MacCallum leaned his bar against the rock and shrugged his shoulders, foolishly relaxed, a Charlie Chaplin in miner’s garb. “Oh, Larry’s pretty good at knowing when folks are coming. He just gives me the high sign, and I step out of sight. No one was expecting to see me here, so no one did. It’s kind of like looking for gold, Virgil; you have to open your mind to what’s possible.”

  “You gave me one hell of a scare!” Virgil said, still furious.

  “Aw, hell, Virgil, I didn’t mean to worry you. I know you’ve got your safety record to worry about and all, but it never occurred to me that you’d . . . well, you know.”

  Virgil’s face had turned ghostly in the scant illumination of our bead lamps. “I thought something had gone wrong because we argued”

  MacCallum’s laughter erupted again. “What? You mean when we had words over that map you wanted? Aw, hell, Virgil, I’m more stable than that! I just needed a little time, was all, and . . . well . . .” His face clouded. “No, my reasons for coming down here had nothing to do with you.”

  Was Virgil correct about MacCallum? I decided to test the only other possible explanation he might have for hiding from Virgil, and everyone else on the surface. “I have a message for you,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Sam died during the night. And the BLM agent you were. worried about is gone* anyway. No one can hurt him anymore.”

  MacCallum bowed his head, tipping his hard hat and its light toward the ground. He said nothing for a while, then, “Did he die at Rosebud?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” When he lifted his head, MacCallum’s eyes were shining with tears. He was not Sam’s murderer.

  I said, “So I guess it’s okay to come out now.”

  MacCallum nodded.

  Virgil said, “What in hell are you two talking about?”

  I answered for MacCallum. “He was just down here so an old man could die in peace. You wanted to file a map of Phase Two. That’s where the old man lived.”

  MacCallum said, “The minute you filed for that permit that prissy, officious new jackass from the BLM would have gone out there to inspect the place. He would have thrown Sam off the place in an instant.”

  Virgil shook his head in confusion, then said, “Have you heard who else is dead?”

  “Well, I heard about Pat Gilmore.” He kicked at a rock. “Poor woman. She got to hurrying, right? And—”

  “Wait,” said Virgil. “If Don here didn’t kill Pat, then who did?”

  “Kyle Christie,” I blurted. Tom Latimer was right I did need someone to teach me a few things. Such as how to keep my mouth shut

  “Now just how in hell’s name do you have that one figured?” Virgil demanded.

  “Have you or John Steinhoff described the scene of the wreck to anyone?”

  Virgil said, “Hell no. Obernick told us not to. I didn’t and I can vouch for John. I’ve known him for decades. Neither one of us said a word to anybody.”

  “And how long did that range fire burn?”

  “Two days.”

  “Then, you see? Anyone who could describe the crash site the morning after it happened saw it,” I said. “Kyle knew that pickup had flipped, and where. How’d he know that? And there’s forensic evidence. She was killed by a blow to the top of the head with a square-ended weapon. That would be a mineral hammer. No geologist would be without one. And come to think of it, Kyle’s the only man around here I’ve seen who’s tall enough to land one on the top of a big woman’s head.”

  I turned to MacCallum. “Umberto Rodriguez is dead, too.”

  MacCallum’s mouth sagged open.

  Virgil said, “God knows why. Someone dumped him and his vehicle down a mine shaft over on the Kammas.”

  MacCallum’s eyes pulled into a pained squint.

  Virgil shot MacCallum a look. “I’ll bet that was your pal Kyle, too,” he said.

  MacCallum cocked his head to one side and said, “Aw, you just can’t let that go, can you? This is all nonsense. Kyle’s a stupid putz. He wouldn’t hurt a—”

  Virgil cut MacCallum off with a roar. “I tell you, he doesn’t show women proper respect!”

  MacCallum stared at the floor. “Nobody’s perfect Virgil.”

  “Perfect? Hell, he’s hopeless. The two of you! You’ve been sitting on something out there in the Kammas! You’re holding out on us!”

  MacCallum spread his hands. “Holding out on you? Oh, sure Virgil, I found something, but have I found what you needed me to find? You know just as well as I do that very few exploration targets pan out. I found a vein, sure, but hell, everybody knows there’s mineralization in those mountains. We’ve known that for a century, before you or I were born. And yeah, I’ve kind of knit things together into a bigger picture, but . . . You aren’t telling me you bought all Chittenden’s crap, did you? Come on, Virgil! The man’s a comedian!”

  Clearly Virgil had. Or had let himself hope. He sagged back against the wall again, his eyes round with the vacancy of grief.

  Just then, I saw a light out of the corner of my eye where there had not been
one a moment ago. I moved carefully down over the rubble toward the turn to see what was causing it

  The light vanished, as if someone had turned it off from a switch.

  “Who’s there?” I asked, turning my headlamp this way and that.

  Suddenly, my light swept across a pair of legs. In the instant it took me to sweep my light back again and up, I heard the sound of iron striking rock, and as I found my target, I saw Kyle Christie with his arms up to the rock above us. He was jamming another long iron bar home, right into the shark’s teeth.

  I turned and ran, screaming a warning to Virgil and MacCallum. In the next instant, the earth roared, and something huge slammed my back and propelled me forward. I hit the working face like an egg, all air instantly squeezed from my lungs. My mind jammed. My body went numb, and all fell into total darkness.

  38

  SLOWLY, A LOUD RINGING IN MY EARS DREW ME back to partial consciousness. I tried to breathe but could not Fingers probed around my face, pried into my mouth, with-drew, danced down my cheek to my throat and felt along it

  “Can you hear me?” said a tiny, excited voice. “Breathe, damn it!”

  Slowly, I realized that the voice only sounded tiny through the icy ringing in my ears.

  “Are you all right?” the voice was asking. Begging.

  I tried to speak, but could not. Bit by bit, the numbness gave way to pain, and I reasoned out which way was up. The pressure against my cheek and belly was the rock below me, and I was lying on it. But I could not take a breath. Then suddenly, air rushed painfully into my lungs as my rib cage sprung back into shape. I coughed. I opened my eyes, but could see nothing. The hand touched my face again, from a different angle.

  “Oh good, you’re alive,” said the voice, a little louder now. “Do you know where Virgil is? Can you feel him under there? Wait I think I found my light.”

  The field before my eyes turned from totally black to gray. A thick pall of rockdust roiled about before my eyes. I tried to move, but could not.

  “I’ll check your back and legs now,” Don said, his voice still almost lost in the terrible ringing that filled my ears. “You tell me if anything hurts.”

  Pain shot up through my right leg. “There,” I said, grabbing toward the apex of the worst hurt.

  He probed along it. “Broken,” he said.

  “What hit?”

  “The concussion of the collapse. We were lucky it spent most of its force at the turn in the stope. Oh, hell, there’s Virgil!”

  Through the churning dust, I could see Virgil lying on his side, the blue of his shirt barely discernable between a mantle of rubble, and the falling pall of gray. His legs were covered with rubble, but his hard hat was still in place. His eyes were open and his lips moved feebly. I dragged myself toward him with my hands and put my ear to his mouth.

  “Forgot to pray,” he whispered. “She warned me. . . .”

  “Hang on, Virgil!” I gasped. “We’ll get you out. No more bad dreams.”

  MacCallum hurled debris away from his legs, slowly uncovering them. “Oh. This is bad.”

  I looked. There was a lot of blood, all pasty with the dust. I pulled off my equipment belt and handed it to MacCallum so that he could tie a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Virgil’s breath came raggledly. Then it stopped. I felt for a pulse at his throat. I could not find one. Then, dizzy with my own pain, I felt for broken ribs, preparing to start CPR. Finally, I realized that I was wasting time, and pulled off his hard hat cleared his air passage, set my lips to his, and exhaled the air from my lungs into his. MacCallum put one hand over the other on Virgil’s heart, and began to pump.

  39

  BREATHING THE TENUOUS EDGE OF LIFE BACK INTO a man is a strange way to get to know him. We heard ribs crack before Virgil’s lungs remembered their job and started moving again, but his pulse remained fast and faint. His eyes did not open. He did not speak. He did not respond.

  “We need to get him out of here,” said MacCallum. “I’m going to see if there’s a passage.” He scrambled up over the tumble of loose rocks and searched, leaving me in the velvet darkness. I held Virgil’s hand and watched MacCallum’s tiny bobbing light, trying not to think of what it might be like if MacCallum left, or were crushed by settling rubble.

  After agonizingly long minutes, he called back through the oddly muffled space. “There’s no way out” he said. “And there’s a big slab hanging over the top of the pile. If I touch it or move anything from beneath it, it’s going to come down on us like a torpedo. So don’t move. How’s Virgil?”

  “He’s with us for the moment,” I answered.

  MacCallum’s headlamp began to move again.

  Trying to control my rising panic, I called, “If you get crushed up there, then I’m here in the dark by myself with two dead men. Please come down.”

  MacCallum’s light turned back toward the immense knife edge of rock that was aimed at us. He crouched, considering the rock from every angle, double-checking his analysis. Finally, he turned and came carefully down the rockfall, moving on all fours, like a spider. His light seemed to flicker.

  “Is your battery wearing out?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I was due to replace it. My spare’s under a hundred tons of rock now. Virgil’s is crushed. How is yours?” He reached down to Virgil’s battered leg and gently teased the battery loose from the belt I had worn. I could see that it had suffered the same fate as Virgil’s. “The good news,” MacCallum said, “is that whatever hit this thing did not hit your kidneys.”

  “What are we going to do?” I said, my voice a half-octave higher than usual.

  “We wait,” he said. MacCallum eased the pressure on Virgil’s tourniquet for a moment, then tightened it again. Then he stepped back over me, found himself a place to sit took his hard hat and equipment belt off, and set them to one side. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then pushed his fingers up through his hair. Then he reached over to his headlamp and switched it off.

  “We wait in the dark?” I gasped.

  “Yes. Save the battery.”

  I tried not to think of the precariously balanced tumble of rocks that rested only inches from my feet. Tried to control my breathing, not knowing how long the air would last. Tried not to think about the pain that was now pulsing in my leg.

  MacCallum found my hand in the dark and held it gently, calming me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There are good men who already know what’s happened. They know what they’re doing.”

  “You trust them,” I answered.

  “I do.”

  Moments ticked by in the concussive darkness. “What’s that feel like?”

  “What?”

  “Trusting someone with your life.”

  MacCallum didn’t answer right away, but then said, “It’s like having many brothers. You might fight with them, but when you’re in danger, you want them there.” He squeezed my hand again. “How’s your leg?”

  “It hurts. I’ll be all right,” I said hopefully. “Have you been in total darkness like this before?”

  “Many times. I find it soothing.” He yawned.

  “What is it that draws men down here?” I asked, trying to keep him talking. Right then, I would have asked him to recite the Gettysburg Address just to hear the sound of his voice.

  He considered my question for a while. “When I’m down here, when I drill into this rock and expose a new face, I am little seeing something that no man has seen before. It’s kind of like being there at the moment of creation.”

  The moment of discovery. Ever new, ever marvelous. I clung to the feeling it conjured. I had found it in a sunrise, a newly opened flower, or the right correlation between well logs just brought from the field and laid out across my desk at an oil company. In that instant the darkness was less terrifying. But the instant did not last. “What do you think is going to happen?” I asked.

  MacCallum said, “The future is an elusive thing.”

  “Aren’t
you terrified?” I panted, thinking about the tons of rock that lay before me in the dark, just waiting to settle with the first bit of shaking. I did not like to think that I might have survived this only to be killed when the rescuers knocked something loose trying to help me.

  “Not as long as, I’m still in the game.” He laughed; just a quick, intoxicated riffle of sound.

  “How can you be so calm?” I asked.

  “What else should I do? The past we can map, with one degree of accuracy or another, but the future is a place of die unknown. There’s nothing I can do. I have no idea how much rock is there. I will only exhaust myself if I worry about it. So I leave it to the others.”

  “I’m in pitch darkness with a total madman,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A mine collapses on you, worse yet your old partner did it to you, and you get sleepy.”

  “Kyle did this? You’re raving. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “You lose a million dollars in stock value, and you think it’s penny-ante poker.”

  “No, that wasn’t funny,” he said irritably, “but it’s a game, and I’m still a player. Hell, there’s gold all around me. What do I have to worry about?”

  Gold? I wanted to scream. We didn’t need gold, we needed water, and food, and a medic. “You’re nuts. You think gold can buy you out of anything. You think it’s money, just like every other nutcase that ever wandered off up a gully with a rock hammer.”

  “No, I don’t. It’s just a metal.”

  “But Rudolf said—”

  “The reindeer?” MacCallum laughed. The sound bubbled like champagne out of the bizarre world of detached clarity he seemed to inhabit. I could see now that he was indeed a wizard. He lived in a strange splinter zone of genius, some-where in that narrow boundary region of detached thought that lay between my more pedestrian outlook and fall-on in-sanity.

  “No,” I said. “Of course you don’t know Rudolf. He’s just a gold junkie I met. He told me that everyone sees gold as money. Everyone except me, apparently.”