A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  THE WILDERNESS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  THE SPECTER OF WANT AND DISASTER

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  COLD HARBOR

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  APPOMATTOX

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  STRIKE THE TENT

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  To Katie and Joe. My gold mine.

  “Circumstance is incommensurable: let none essay to measure men who are its creatures.”

  —Douglas Southall Freeman, from

  his biography of Robert E. Lee

  PROLOGUE

  A small mountain airport, shrouded in fog, dusted with summer snow. Visibility of about twenty feet, butt-cold, but no wind.

  “July in the Rockies. What the fuck.”

  “Is it safe to fly?”

  Three businessmen in heavy, hooded, fur-lined coats waited, stamping their feet on the tarmac, near a slutty red Bell 206L–3 Longranger helicopter, just warming up. Stan Beachum—salesman, squat, fit, gym-sculpted, hair-deprived, slicker than a non-stick pan—squinted up into the cerulean sky, tugged the brim of his baseball cap, and made a well-considered and thoughtful downturn of mouth.

  “She’s just ground fog, this soup,” Beachum observed. “Once we’re airborne, it’s blue skies to X marks the spot. But . . . Freak weather indeed. Coupla slides have closed Colorado 5, so . . . Lucky we got your whirlybird, huh? Unless you wanted to wait a couple days and chance there’s a quick thaw and a frisky road repair.”

  The Slocumbs, Paul and Saul, Pakistanis by–way–of–Jackson Hole, Leadville, and Beaver Creek, with flawless walnut complexions and thick, flapjack-flat west Wyoming patois, didn’t want to wait, no. Fraternal twins of a single mind. Saul looked at his watch. Tag Heuer. Swiss avant-garde since 1860. The crystal was fractured, and Saul made a point of not having it fixed. He wasn’t really interested in the time, just dramatizing his irritation.

  “Is he always late?”

  “Yes,” Beachum drawled, laconic. “They say it’s the surest sign of genius.”

  “Who?” Paul asked sharply. “Who says that?”

  The Bell engine fired up, whining, high-pitched, its rotor blades whirling and whorpling to life, a quartet of disorganized samurai swords, drowning out any attempts at continuing the conversation.

  The men stood, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, pricked by the icy crystals whipped up by the helicopter’s mad frenzy.

  A quarter of a mile away, out in the nether-reaches of the empty Garfield County Regional Airport parking lot, forty(ish) Lee Garrison, slumped in the front seat of an old, classic black Chevy Camaro, was hyperventilating. There were Band-Aids on three of his knuckles and his forehead, somewhat diminishing how uncommonly guileless, almost boyish, Lee really was. He took a brown paper bag off the seat beside him, shook it out, and jammed his face into it to settle his breathing but all the while giving him the ungainly turtled posture of a gluehead huffing EZ-Off.

  “Ohgodgodgodohgodohgodoh—”

  Lee shouldered the door open and lurched out, unfolding himself from the car, awkwardly, and yanking an old black briefcase off of the backseat. He balled up the paper sack and sucked in the cold, thin mountain air. He wore the same fur-trimmed winter coat as the Slocumbs (a testament to the twins’ foresight and perennial devotion to the End-of-season Skiwear Close-out Sale at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Longmont) and some sooty, fleece-lined rubber boots he’d found in the front closet at home, but didn’t think were his. His feet scudded around inside them as he came running across the tarmac to where the three men were waiting for him, wind from the flight-ready helicopter rotors whipping their parka hoods and flogging Beachum’s lucky Sky Sox cap and tangling Lee’s uncombed mop of hair.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  Beachum’s lips moved, but Lee couldn’t hear him. Blah blah blah. Lee smiled and they all shook hands and traded pleasantries lost in the turbulence and got into the Bell Longranger and, like a miracle, Lee thought, it lifted skyward. Science rules. In less than a minute they were above the fog, and the famous liquid blue, sunshiny, seemingly limitless Rocky Mountain sky yawned above them, dwarfing them.

  Western slope thermals rocked the chopper like rolling ocean waves. The men bore due east under that bleached canopy, following an intermittent dark ribbon of Interstate 70 as it snaked through high country calicoed, where the fog cleared, with conifer forests, low slate clouds, and drought-scarred plains. Lee gazed down on the badlands beyond the Bookcliffs and Rifle Gap and remembered his merit-badge survival hike for Scouts, seven days in the wild with a knife and a bedroll and a box of matches. He lost six pounds; ate pine needles boiled; sought shelter from an electrical storm in a cave on the banks of the Green River and surprised a fellow Survival Pledge getting blown by Mr. Pilgrim, the assistant troop leader. Pants down, chapped asses. Sad. Lee never told anybody, passed Survival, and became an Eagle Scout. Mr. Pilgrim died of some kind of cancer and the Survival Pledge was now a family-values conservative assemblyman in the Colorado State Legislature. Third term.

  “How’s it feel to be a rich man, Lee?”

  Lee looked at Beachum, riding shotgun beside the pilot, and took a minute to assemble the individual words and make sense of them. His mind was thick, leaden. His heart was pounding. Lee was mashed three abreast with the Slocumbs in the backseat, the black briefcase in his lap, sure that they could feel his heart, too, pounding, and it would give him away.

  “I wouldn’t know yet.”

  Saul Slocumb assured him they’d wired the money to Lee’s bank first thing that morning.

  “Prolly put a ten-day hold on it, though,” Saul’s brother opined darkly. Beachum laughed.

  “A ten-day hold on a million bucks. Yessir. Ain’t that hysterical. They clear your check overnight through the Federal Reserve, then get to use your million bucks free for nine days. Banks suck.”

  Lee squirmed. “I’m hot.”

  “Understatement,” Saul observed. “From a man sitting on quite possibly the biggest goll durned gold strike since Cripple Creek.

  “I would say you’re boiling, sir,” Saul added.

  “I can’t breathe,” Lee said.

  Beachum, a joke: “Want me to open a window?”

  “No. Um. You know what? Lemme just—yeah, if I could just—”

  Lee unbuckled his seat belt and tried to stand up. The pilot glanced back. “Sit down, sir.”

  “Air. I need air.”

  The pilot let the chopper veer as he turned his whole body and reached back with an arm, grabbing at the empty space around the moving Lee. “Sir, I need you to take a seat.”

  Lee stepped on feet, groped for the door handle, clambering over Saul Slocumb. Icy, thermal wind slapped them hard. Beachum yelled. Lee threw his briefcase out the open door and followed it, headfirst.

  Those remaining in the helicopter saw a black tumble of a man dropping away from them, coat blown up, flapping, arms
windmilling, as if to fly. A fluffy bird, with thin Gore-Tex wings and a briefcase.

  Smaller and smaller.

  Plummeting into the soft, white fog.

  For a long time nobody in the cockpit of the Bell Longranger said anything. The helicopter spun stunned circles. Sunlight glowed off the slut-red canopy and trim, giving them all a hellish glow.

  “Je-sus,” Beachum said finally. “Hell-o. Lord God in Heaven.”

  He threw up.

  THE WILDERNESS

  ONE

  He stopped on the sidewalk even though he promised himself he wouldn’t—not that tired cliché; he stopped, took a deep breath of the fresh air, and squinted up uncertainly into an ashen sky burned partway through by an uncertain sun.

  It was true, he thought, what they said about getting out.

  Light mist slicked the buff stone walls of the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility and caused the chain link to glisten like polished silver. Next to the big wire-cage drive-through gate, a smaller pedestrian passageway had opened for him, and the stolid guards in the tower had made a passing note of him as the system kicked him free, debt paid.

  He crossed the road and didn’t look back.

  “My brother bought a gold mine.”

  Allie, waitress at the Whistle Stop, leaned on the counter, her long legs pulling the stretch hem of her uniform, one sneaker foot turned in, swaying absently, and she gazed, ensorcelled, into the icy eyes of the coffee-black-lots-of-sugar man who smelled faintly of soap and regret and wore the boxy secondhand pants and shirt and navy pea coat of a day laborer (which he totally wasn’t) but that nevertheless worked on him, and she decided, then and there, he had that kind of dreamy, dangerous electricity that women tend to ruin themselves over.

  Allie was always looking to get ruined.

  “A lot of people thought it was midlife crisis,” the coffee man was saying, “triggered I guess by this prank his senior shop class played on him with their midterm woodworking projects right after Lorraine moved out.”

  “Your brother teaches high school?”

  “Two dozen or so sanded and shellacked head-racks of wooden antlers,” the coffee man continued, ignoring the interruption. “Handmade with varying skill. He sent me a picture.” The waitress just stared at him with a retriever’s empty hopefulness. “You know. As in: cuckolded. Having the,” he made two points on his head with his fingers, “horns hung on you?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Grant.”

  “Grant. What kind of name is that?”

  “Famous general.”

  Her face, blank again.

  “Civil War? My parents were . . . ” he began, then stopped. “Anyway. It’s a long story, and I’m telling you a different one now, okay?”

  “Okay.” She cracked her gum, flirty.

  “It was kind of funny,” Grant resumed, “and snarky but droll, in that arrested adolescent way that weblogs and reality TV and comic book pop culture reduces other people’s pain to a punch line; it was funny if you weren’t my brother, Lee, or you’d never read Ulysses, which, of course, his senior boys hadn’t, but my brother Lee has . . . four times, front to back.”

  “I’m Allie.”

  “But people are so wrong, Allie. That old backhoe from hell he took home from the highway department auction after Lorraine moved out? That was his midlife thing.”

  Allie thought: Lorraine?

  “Rumbling through those shake roof split-levels of Hiwan Meadows like, I don’t know, a mutant mustard-yellow shellfish in a Japanese horror film or something, all dust and exhaust, the one big scorpion-tail shovel-claw thing poised to make hash of all the terrified mole-people Priuses multiplying in every driveway.”

  “Oh.”

  “Personally, I expected a boat, but . . . ”

  “A boat?”

  “Oceangoing vessel. Something with a motor, not sails. Lee’s got a seafaring bent. Maybe a trawler. He belongs to a boat club.”

  “Does your brother live near the ocean?”

  “No. Evergreen.”

  “Evergreen, here in Colorado?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.” The waitress frowned.

  “They get together in Broomfield the third Saturday of every month and talk about nautical stuff.”

  “They live in a state that gets, what, gee . . . about, oh, three inches of rain, annually?”

  “Some can dream.”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyway, the mine is, was, well—could just be that Lee believes happiness is something you gotta dig for. I don’t know,” Grant said.

  “You got a way with words, Grant.”

  “I kissed the Blarney Stone, Allie.”

  “Oh.” Again, she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Ireland. I was eight. It’s a stone, actually part of the wall in this iron-age castle; you lean back over a gaping hole, turn your face upside down, kiss the stone, and you get the gift of gab. It’s about a hundred fifty feet up—the hole you can fall through—so some fat Mick, who smells of Guinness and old jeans, sits there and for, say, a euro, buck and a half U.S. thank you very much, he holds you up over the drop, and then washes the stone off afterwards with this scuzzy rag and some Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner. We were there with our parents. Lee wouldn’t do it, but I did, and, ever since, you actually can’t shut me up. True story.”

  “Huh. More coffee?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Allie’s ass was her best asset, and she could tell, pivoting to the coffee machine, that Grant’s grey eyes were on it.

  “Where you from?”

  “I just got out of Territorial Prison.”

  Allie nearly spilled the coffee. Grant reached out, steadied her hand. His fingers were warm and unexpectedly soft.

  “Yeah. Everything you think, don’t even ask. And yes, I am horny as a dandy, but you, do not worry, are safe as milk.”

  Not surprisingly, Allie was conflicted about whether she wanted to be safe as milk. She put the coffeepot down on the warmer. How long was he in—?

  “Can we, um, talk about something else? Because . . . well, I am my brother’s brother, and he—”

  “Snap. Horny as a dandy!” she said. “Now I get it! Mousse T. and the Dandy Warhols! I have the ’So Phat!’ mash-up; it’s off the hook. I can’t believe you knew about that!”

  Grant didn’t. It was just the way his life worked, things always falling into place. Allie felt his eyes on her again, eyes you could drown in, a sweet, soft, long, wet goodbye, worth it. Totally worth it, she supposed.

  Although.

  Prison.

  Grant sipped his coffee, stirred in more sugar, tasted it. Now, he realized irritably, it was too sweet. And it was as if he could read Allie’s look:

  “Assault,” he told her. “I did just two years of a possible five. Look, Allie, we’re just here talking, okay? I’m not angling for anything, just some civilian conversation, with a pretty girl is good, it’s been a long time, but—”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Grant thought: Okay. He slipped into neutral. Okay.

  “You don’t look like an ex-con. We see a lot of them coming through. You know. You’re different.”

  Grant just stared at her.

  “I get off in an hour,” she said.

  Grant just stared at her.

  She shifted her hips, self-conscious, the hem of her skirt stretching, and again she was aware of her ass. “What happened to Mr. Sweet Words?” she teased him. “I mean, a minute ago you were yakking like a talk show, and now . . . ?”

  “There’s this Navajo superstition about balance in the universe, Allie. Well, actually, it’s probably Zoroastrian, which predates the Navajo by about fourteen hundred years if you want to get all formal about it—but, hey, we’re in Navajo country so—well, actually, no, Colorado, what, Pawnee? Arapaho? Ute? Ouray? I can never keep the Southern Plains tribes straight. It doesn’t matter. The Navajo, they have this superst
ition, it goes: If you’re evil, you’ve got to do some good. But if you’re too good, well, you gotta get a little evil. You know. Just to even things out.”

  Allie was thinking about where they could go after work. Motels were depressing; her sister was probably already at home watching The View; she most certainly was not going to do it in the car, her Scion, with an ex-convict, on the fabric seats and the stale smell of her boyfriend’s cigarettes. Oh Allison, please, no, no, that would be, God, so low.

  And condoms. She was definitely going to insist on using protection.

  “But Lee?” Grant shook his head and pushed the coffee cup away. “Lee. My brother. Has spent just about his whole fucking life being good. So . . . I suppose . . . that’s where I come in.”

  He looked up at Allie, and his beautiful, sad, apologetic smile torched all that remained of her self-respect.

  TWO

  A land listing on eBay:COLORADO GOLD MINE.

  $32,300.00 USD

  Buy It Now!

  What a sensational opportunity for the right person!

  Forgive the casual nature of my pitch, but I’m not one who goes in for all that fussy, starched formality, which may be why I’m in the mining business, under open skies, and not some windowless box behind a desk!

  THE PITCH: My Blue Lark Mine is a United States Patented Gold Mine that received its certificate way back in 1878. Technically, it’s three overlapping lode claims: the Phoenix, the Griffin, and the Unicorn—all mythical beasts, but there’s no myth in these mines; they’re the real thing.

  WHAT THE PATENT MEANS: In order for a mine to be patented back in the old days (and even now), prospectors had to prove to the U.S. Government that there was, as they used to say, in fact, “gold in them thar hills.” Uncle Sam eyeballed all claims pretty carefully since tax money was at stake. These poor miners had to pull something to the tune of one thousand tons of ore out and process it right there in front of a federal patent agent to prove there was a viable opportunity for an ongoing business of mineral extraction and not just some devious landgrab going on.