Dominoes in Time

by Matthew Warner

  I finally found my voice. “You sure ’bout this?”

  Charles’s hat and coat were already on the floor. He paused in the act of pulling off his suspenders. “Why? You got a hankerin’?” He licked his lips. “Why don’t you go first? Be kind of a reunion.”

  I couldn’t say no, and yet I couldn’t say yes. It was rank craziness.

  I found myself taking off my coat and shirt anyway. My hands had their own mind. My soul, I felt it hovering, waiting to see what I would do.

  When my breasts spilled free, Charles and Remy stared blank-faced like Johnny had just shot ’em.

  “But you’re a…” Charles said. “Can’t be.”

  Tied spread-eagle and naked to the table, Emma looked at me with wide eyes. “Frances? That you?”

  The boning knife was in front of me. I seized it and rammed the spike into Charles’s left eye. He started shaking. His knees buckled. As he fell, I withdrew the knife, which came out slicked with blood.

  Remy backed away. “No, no.”

  I circled the table. As he turned tail, I impaled him between the shoulder blades. Then I pulled it out and stabbed again.

  “Frances!” Emma strained against her bonds. “What… what have you become?”

  I blinked at her. I tried to wipe blood off my face with the back of my hand and only succeeded in smearing it. “Don’t know what I am. Don’t matter no more.”

  “Please. Help me. I’ll do anything.”

  Instead, I grabbed a rag off the table and stuffed it into her mouth. Then I shucked the rest of my clothes and climbed on top of her.

  “Be mine again. Just be mine.”

  Monarch of the Mountains

  Some days, Jobe wondered which was worse: to be back home with the Confederate army, possibly getting his legs blown off, or to be here in Nevada, swinging a sledge to dig a new silver mine.

  “Dammit, watch where you’re aiming.” His partner, Louis, threw down the long spike of the iron drill and fell over.

  “My apologies. Mind wandered.”

  “Shee-it.” Louis spat out dust and stood up. This put his head and shoulders above the opening of the shaft. The hole they were digging was so far only five feet across and few feet deep. He climbed out.

  “Come back. We ain’t even put in the blasting powder yet.”

  “Forget it. It’s pointless.” Standing out on the rocky mountainside, Louis took off his hat, suspenders, and sweat-stained shirt. The morning sun highlighted the dust in his beard. “That silver must be two hundred feet down. We’ll be old and broken afore we dig that deep.”

  Jobe was too weary to climb out as well, so he just folded his arms on the lip of the shaft and rested his head on them. Louis was like a father to him. And Louis had brought them out here to be miners. Now he was just going to give up? “How about gettin’ another stake in one of them older mines? We got us some silver there, we did.”

  “A pitiful couple handfuls. And we broke our backs in the mill to extract ’em. Don’t you forget it.”

  Jobe hadn’t forgotten. Extraction required fourteen-hour days of standing next to steam-driven rock crushers, whose noise about drove him crazy. And all the while, he never stopped scooping pulp out of pans, shoveling sand out of the drainage ditch and dashing it against an upright wire screen, washing mud from the crushers, and making snowballs of quicksilver mixed with the real stuff to be boiled.

  “I suppose you want to go back to gambling, then.”

  Louis stared at him. “That’s a low blow.”

  Jobe turned his back. He crossed his arms and leaned against the inside of the shaft. A moment later, he heard Louis walk away.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Well, he had a right to talk strongly to Louis. Didn’t he, now?

  It was Louis who brought Jobe and his boy, Sammy, out here from Georgia to begin with. Him and all his talk of getting rich. But Louis was always like that. Twenty years ago, when Jobe was just a youngster, Louis took him traveling in his mule cart as he hawked “elixir” cures for everything from impotence to hysteria. When that failed, they returned home. Still, Louis convinced him years later to go to California, where they tried making money as bookies during the white-versus-red-man foot races to prove racial superiority. That also failed.

  When Jobe got married and had a son, he announced he was through with such adventures. Louis had seemed angry but acquiesced with a tip of his hat toward Jobe’s wife, Mollie, and son, Sammy.

  Louis didn’t return until Sammy was a man. He was full of tales about the silver to be mined in Nevada.

  “Please, Daddy,” Sammy had said in response. “He wants us to come along, and I want to be rich.”

  “Go,” Mollie said. She spoke with her back to Jobe as she worked at the stove so he wouldn’t see her weep. “Get our boy away from this war. I can’t travel on account of Mother. She’s depending on me.” She sighed, then continued in a hitching voice. “I never liked that man. Don’t let him make Sammy do nothing he don’t want to.”

  So they went. But silver mining proved to be hard work. Soon, Louis wanted to make money other ways.

  “Give me a few nights at the saloon,” he said one evening. The three of them sat huddled around an oil lantern in their tent. “I’ll make us rich playing Faro, and we can go home. I’ll take Sammy as a shill.”

  “Uh huh,” Jobe said. “I suppose you’ll be needing seed money?”

  “Ten dollars oughta do it.”

  “Ten. Ten?”

  The sum was huge. They would need to pool their resources for sure.

  “Come on, Daddy,” Sammy said. “Give it to him.”

  No way in hellfire was he trusting Louis with their savings. Sure, Louis’s gambling skills kept them solvent on the way here, but that was no reason to go whole hog like this.

  And yet, doing what Louis told him was a hard habit to break. He couldn’t just go back on a lifetime of trusting him—of trying to please him and gain his approval—even if it seemed like a mistake. Louis brought them out here, and Louis by God promised to bring them home.

  “C’mon, boy,” Louis said. “Don’t be a sissy.”

  Jobe’s blood boiled a bit at that. It always had. He hauled out his money and threw it at the older man.

  The next morning, he sorely regretted giving in. That was when he stood looking down into a thousand-foot-deep shaft over the great Comstock mine. His son’s body had landed somewhere down there.

  “It was an accident,” Louis explained as he stood next to him. “We lost all but one dollar gambling, and Sammy got himself liquored up with it.”

  “And where were you?” Jobe was surprised at the evenness of his voice.

  Louis used his toe to push a pebble into the shaft. “Talking to a damsel. Thought I was getting somewheres. She turned out to be a whore.”

  Jobe waited for him to continue. He couldn’t take his eyes off the open shaft.

  “A cowboy come in. Said he saw a youngster with a whiskey bottle fall down a shaft. I asked what he looked like, and he said torn blue trousers, thin beard, and a red kerchief.”

  Jobe closed his eyes. That described Sammy to a T.

  Miners searched the galleries beneath all the open shafts, but Sammy’s body was never found.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  So, here they were, one month after Sammy’s death, penniless and desperate. Jobe had written the sad news home to Mollie, but he had no idea if she received his letter.

  A few minutes after walking off, Louis returned. Jobe kept his back to him, arms crossed as he leaned against the inside of the hole.

  “Well?” Louis said. ”You gonna come out, or ain’t ya?”

  “Can’t go home yet. Ain’t going home both poor and without my son.”

  “Sometimes things just don’t work out, Jobe.”

  Jobe spun around and gripped the edges of the hole. “Don’t tell me it ain’t going to work out. Sammy… did not… die… for nothing!” With each phrase, he pounded his fist on the rock, send
ing up little plumes of dust.

  “All right, all right.” Shaking his head, Louis sighed and prepared to climb back in. “But you hear me, and listen good. I ain’t gonna spend my last breaths digging some well to nowheres. I’ll work with you till the end of the day. But if we ain’t found nothing, I’m done.”

  “Just till…? Fine. Just fine.”

  Shaking his head, Jobe hoisted the sledge and waited for Louis to pick up the drill. They wouldn’t find anything in just one day, and they both knew it.

  Jobe hated his partner just then—hated him as passionately as if Louis and not liquor were responsible for Sammy’s death. Hell, if it weren’t for Louis, they wouldn’t be here, and Sammy wouldn’t be dead.

  It would be so easy to swing a foot to the left, split the bearded man’s head open like a watermelon.

  Jobe grit his teeth. He brought the sledge down on the drill with a resounding clang.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Mines in Virginia City weren’t known for their modest names. This one was no exception. They had named it Monarch of the Mountains. That was on the day—after a week of wearing holes in their shoes searching—they chanced on this lifeless stretch of mountainside. Louis had broken off some rocks and examined them with his eyeglass before announcing it was full of quartz with trace bits of silver. They staked their claim by hammering a notice into the ground, then filed a copy with the mining recorder’s office. As required by law, they returned within ten days to begin digging so their claim wouldn’t be forfeit. Starting that shaft was the first happy thing they’d done since Sammy died.

  But now the mine was about to die, too, just as soon as the sun went down and Louis declared it a bust.

  Jobe stood outside the shaft. At his feet, Louis lay on his stomach with his head and shoulders in the opening, applying the hot end of a cigar to a fuse. It trailed into the hole and sank into a quantity of black powder, sand, and gravel.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Jobe helped him to his feet. They ran like hell.

  The explosion shot rocks and smoke into the air.

  As they walked back, Jobe knew they would find just a bushel of loose quartz at the bottom and nothing more. As sure as shooting, there’d wouldn’t be no gift-wrapped boulder of silver sitting down there, if that’s what Louis was waiting on. Jobe mentally composed a speech to ask for a few more days.

  But his thoughts derailed as he peered over the lip of the hole. There was no quartz waiting at the bottom of the Monarch of the Mountains mine shaft.

  There wasn’t anything down there at all.

  Where once had lain a rocky floor now yawned a dark hole. The men dropped to their stomachs to look in.

  “Hellfire,” Louis said. “We hit a cavern.”

  “Is that good?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  As Louis slithered farther inward, Jobe was obliged to grab the back of the older man’s trousers.

  “I can see the bottom. It ain’t far. It’s a tunnel. Goes left and right. And… damn!”

  Louis was too far in. He screamed as he started to fall.

  Jobe clawed at his clothing. A suspender twanged as it snapped loose. “Hold on!”

  “I’m all right. Just let me… let me turn.”

  Louis reached up and grabbed a ledge. Once his feet were hanging below his head, he let go.

  He dropped into the tunnel and landed hard. Jobe cringed as Louis rolled onto his side.

  “You all right?”

  “Sure, I’m just…”

  “What now?”

  “Good Lord. Go get my lantern—and my hammer and eyeglass.”

  “And a rope?”

  “Yes, yes—just git! I think we have us a treasure here.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  By “treasure,” Louis didn’t mean a pirate chest overflowing with gold and rubies. But what he reported up sounded nearly as good.

  “Silver, by God. It’s covering the walls of the tunnel.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  All the rope they owned was only ten yards, but it was long enough for Jobe to tie around a boulder and drop in. He lowered the lantern and tools and then descended, praying the rope wouldn’t slip and trap them both down here.

  The tunnel—more like a tube—was about the height of a man. Its surface curved all the way around and reflected the flickering lantern like water. Jobe touched it and found it smooth and cold.

  “What did this? A river?”

  Louis knelt on the curved floor and used his hammer to chip a piece off the wall. “Not unless that river was molten silver.”

  Jobe frowned. “What are you getting at?”

  Chuckling, Louis squinted through his eyeglass at the rock he’d broken off. “You sure are a dumb cuss sometimes.” He held the rock up to Jobe. “Like I said, it’s silver. Pure.”

  Jobe took it and bit down. He searched it for teeth marks, but the light was too poor.

  “Trust me.”

  Jobe shook his head, still not believing. He wished Sammy were here. God knew that boy had sometimes been an even dumber cuss than his father, but he was quick to set a situation afire with happiness. Jobe, however, would check a gift horse’s teeth two and even three times before accepting it.

  “Don’t need to dig it out,” Louis said. “Don’t need to mill it. Just scrape it off, and take it somewheres to melt into bars. We’re rich. Rich!”

  As Louis stood up and danced a jig, Jobe ventured a smile and tried to set his doubts aside. They had found an underground tunnel lined with pure silver like it was painted on with a brush. But what could have done such a thing?

  Jobe peered uneasily past his whooping and hollering friend into the darkness.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  They agreed to keep their discovery secret, but they knew that once they hauled in their first wagonload of pure silver—the metal just lying there like handfuls of loose clay—they’d be swarmed with shysters and villains.

  They talked it over as they used shovels to skin large chunks from the walls. The sun went down, but they were too excited to call it a day.

  “We need us armed guards out here, ’round the clock,” Jobe said. “First load of silver we melt down and cash in, we buy guns and good tools and maybe a winch so we can haul up pallets full of—”

  “Since when did you get all God-derned smart?”

  Jobe stopped working to gape at his friend. Silver shavings lay in piles around them, twinkling in the lantern light. Louis was covered in white dust, head to foot, and resembled a ghoul.

  “I been leading your skinny ass around since afore you was old enough to reach mine,” Louis said. “So let me handle the details.”

  Jobe used his hat to mop the sweat from his brow. He was too tired to argue. Of course he could see what Louis was already doing: trying to take control, just like always. Next, Louis would argue he deserved more than half of the profits.

  His gaze alighted on a strange shadow over Louis’ shoulder. “What’s that?”

  Louis stared at him a moment before looking away. It made Jobe uneasy. “Another tunnel, looks like.”

  They investigated and discovered a branching tunnel a dozen yards down the passage. It angled gently downward. It was also lined with silver, but the coating seemed even thicker. Jobe wondered how far it descended. He had a vision of men digging a mine at the center of the Earth.

  The light here looked peculiar, as if the silver were glowing and not just reflecting their lantern’s meager flame. His uneasiness deepened.

  “Let’s go back for the night.”

  “What?”

  “Louis, please. Let’s just… I’m tired, is all.”

  A cloud of fury covered the older man’s face, then vanished. “Fine. I could use me a drink.” Louis turned on his heel and led the way to the exit.

  But he halted when a tremor passed through the walls. “What’s that?”

  “Earthquake.�
�

  “No, I… I think it’s a train. Is it a train?”

  Jobe listened and decided he agreed. It was a rumbling noise, all right, shaking and clacking like wheels passing over iron rails. Except there wasn’t a horn nor a hiss of steam—and for that matter, there wasn’t yet a train line anywhere near Virginia City.

  He placed his hand and then his ear to the tunnel wall. “It’s coming closer.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “Oh, shit,” Louis said. “It’s down here, ain’t it? With us.”

  They ran for the rope.

  Ahead of them, a mass moved at the far end of the tunnel. It bore down like a storm front. They wouldn’t be able to climb out in time.

  Jobe skidded in his tracks and plucked at Louis’ shoulder. “The other way!”

  Jobe wanted to avoid the new passage—something about it still bothered him—but it was the best choice. It branched off the main tunnel. Chances were whatever was coming would stay on the higher track.

  He barreled in, and Louis piled in after him.

  The noise shook their insides. Louis poked his head out—then quickly drew back, not believing what he’d just seen.

  It passed by, filling the tunnel they’d exited with a whirling grayness. A blast of wind slammed into them and snaked inside their oil lantern to blow it out.

  Soon the noise receded. Jobe fished a Lucifer out of his tin matchbox and scratched it on the wall. His hand shook as he re-lit the lantern.

  It took Louis a couple tries before he could sputter, “Holy Mary, God, and all the angels. What in the name of Heaven was that?”

  “Let’s get out. Just get out.”

  “What did you see?”

  Jobe began walking. He figured since he held the lantern, Louis would have no choice but to follow.

  Still, he paused to marvel at how the tunnel had transformed. Its walls were covered with a fresh coat of silver, as if their labor of the past few hours never occurred. The silver they’d piled below the access shaft was gone. Their rope still hung, except now it was coated with silver.

  “Confound it, Jobe. What did you see?”

  Jobe didn’t answer as he handed him the lantern. He seized hold of the rope with trembling hands. Pebbles of silver fell off the strand as he climbed up.