A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar Read online

  THE LAW OF THE LAND: All U.S. citizens eighteen years or older have the right under the Mining Law of 1872 to locate a lode claim (hard rock) or placer claim (sand or gravel, usually along a river or stream) on federal land. Locatable minerals include, but are not limited to, your gold, your silver, your platinum, copper, lead, zinc, uranium, and tungsten ores. Patent approved, the mine became the property of the person who first applied for it, and the proved patent, and the land that was the government’s, becomes the personal property of the person who claimed it, in perpetuity. Even if you later build a house on the land and live there, the land is still considered mine property and the taxes will reflect the unimproved property status. In other words, you could have a many-acred parcel of land for the incredible yearly tax of maybe $200! (Don’t you wish your property taxes were that low? I do!) The only way for a patent to be removed is to have the land revert to the government by the owner selling it or trading it to them.

  I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING: You’re thinking the same thing any sane, sensible person would: If the Blue Lark Mine’s loaded with gold, then why are you looking to sell it, ya doddy old coot? Well, let me just say that owning a mine and mining a mine are two completely different propositions. Mining, without a doubt, is a young man’s game! The work can kill ya! I have been a miner for fifty-three of my seventy years, and I have made some hay, raised a family, put food on the table, and can say with all humbleness that I have had my fair share of good fortune. But the Blue Lark was a recent purchase, made in the flush of excitement that follows the rush of discovery, by a gentleman who wakes up most mornings feeling all of eighteen until he looks in the medicine cabinet mirror and sees the grizzled old coot staring back at him. Me! And, sad to say, but true, I have come to realize that that old coot will not be the man to make the Blue Lark pay.

  I have, admittedly, not sunk my good money into the engineers, engineering firms, and geologists. But others have been there and done that, and let’s just say, an analysis done by the School of Mines in ’46 is encouraging. Very encouraging. Cut through the high weeds, what it all boils down to is a measured, indicated, and inferred gold yield of 1.63 OPT (gold per ton) or approximately 774 thousand ounces! It also showed silver running about three to four ounces for every one ounce of gold in the Blue Lark, so it’s conceivable you could also have about three million ounces of silver down there. That’s closing in on half a billion dollars, all told!

  Sound too good to be true?

  Well, they always say that if it seems too good to be true, it usually is! Me, I don’t trust those numbers, and, I’ll be honest with you, my expert guess is the Blue Lark Mine dump will show more like 0.59 OPT, on the high side. That’s half an ounce of gold per ton of ore. Now, this is still a pretty respectable figure. A few years back, when commodity gold was priced at $500 an ounce, professional speculators were reopening mines on the promise of as little as three grams a ton! Now it’s what? $1500? $1800? Sweet Jesus. And what did the Rev. Sen. W. J. Bryan say? “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” That old windbag didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

  A WORD OF CAUTION (AND I DO MEAN CAUTION): Do not presume to go out and locate my mine and think you can do your own assay or a little weekend prospecting on the sly. First off, you would be trespassing, and I would be hard-pressed not to prosecute or worse (a load of double-aught buckshot upside your hairy ass, for example). Secondly, this is an underground mine. Yes, veins may come up to the surface of the property (you will have to tender a real offer to have that disclosed), BUT (and this is the certified lifesaving “but”) all the exploration and blasting that have occurred over the last hundred and thirty–odd years have left the property highly unstable. I will tell you I near lost my brother-in-law down a hole that I couldn’t see the bottom of with a high-beam halogen spot aimed straight down it. (When you drop a rock down something like that and you don’t hear it hit the bottom, you know death is very close to your feet! I’d not have missed him, my in-law, but my sister would not have abided it, and she’s considerably meaner than me, so I managed to hook his belt with my claw hammer and haul him back from the brink.) Stay Out and Stay Alive! It’s not worth it; trust me, it’s really not.

  FOOLS NEED NOT APPLY: Anyone that is a scammer, crook, charlatan, land shark, thief, felon, yuppie, illegal immigrant, liberal Democrat, con man, or otherwise unsavory of character will not get anywhere with me. I’ve seen it all. I’ve been hustled by flimflam artists, and even the FBI couldn’t believe what these characters were trying to pull off! Furthermore, if you have no sense of humor, I really don’t care to truck with you. It’s serious business, surely, but I say if you can’t have fun with it, then go to hell.

  You think I’m sniffing glue? The numbers speak for themselves. Just as a for instance, without revealing too much, let’s say that the Blue Lark offers 0.59 ounces per, and let’s say you put a 300-ton-per-day mobile stamp plant on the property to process the ore; you should, on average, come out with around 175 ounces of gold and 500 ounces of silver per twenty-four-hour day (three eight-hour shifts of loud, hard labor, but you and your friends are young!). Figure a six-day week, and you’d have, at the end of one month, 12,600 ounces of gold and 36,000 ounces of silver. Sold at yesterday’s closing mineral market prices, that’s $22,865,220 in gold and $1,469,880 in silver, or a combined gross of about 24.3 million dollars in just one month!

  You’ve got to admit, with gold at record prices again, this mine seems ripe for the picking. You would be right. But there is one more thing you might want to know.

  FULL DISCLOSURE: The individual who originally prospected it was a Swedish immigrant who hiked back and forth from Silverton, over Loveland Pass, because his wife was sickly and couldn’t tolerate the additional altitude. Well, after a couple of seasons, you can guess what happened: He got caught by an early blizzard and that was all she wrote. Six days in, cold and delirious, he tried to walk out, got turned around, and they found his frozen body thirty miles in the other direction, down mountain, clutching a tintype photograph of his bride and newborn child. His widow pulled up stakes and moved back East to her family, and the Blue Lark subsequently lay fallow for forty years. When she passed, a mining consortium bought the claim from her estate, but that operation went belly-up in the Great Depression. The mine was forgotten and fell into tax arrears and got purchased for pennies on the dollar at auction by a Denver man who never even set foot on the claim, bided his time, and sold it at a fair profit, he believed, to me.

  I know what you’re thinking now: bad luck. There must be a curse on this mine. Well, that’s not unheard of. God only knows, gold does things to people, brings out the worst in most. If you’re a superstitious person, this is NOT for you, and I would go as far as to propose that you do not belong in the mining business at all because it takes a great deal of faith and optimism to go down into a mountain every day and look for your future.

  Not for the faint of heart!

  Not for the doubter and his close cousin, Mr. Despair!

  Truth is, this mine’s just sitting there, waiting for the right someone to come along with a little cash and a lot of gumption and to start pulling that precious metal out.

  Maybe it’s you.

  THREE

  But then, gold was never the point.

  Barely a blemish in fourteen thousand feet of lumpen igneous and metamorphic rock and thawing tundra sprawled under thunderclouds roiling up in a liquid sky, the Blue Lark Patent Mine was just another sorry caved-in dent on the western slope of the Continental Divide, north of the old Loveland Pass, and gold was probably the last thing Lee intended to find there. For two months of weekends he hiked the mountainside with a malfunctioning GPS device trying to locate his claim after the escrow closed. At first, it was just something new to do on weekends if there weren’t tests to grade or demonstrations to prepare or other high school business needing his attention. Unf
ortunately, Lee’s map (crudely drawn not by the seller, [email protected], as promised, but by one of the original turn-of-the-century patent holders as if in the throes of delirium tremens, and then repeatedly photocopied until it had taken on the greasy, translucent quality of a tamale wrapper) had the plat located slightly below a scribble of timberline and directly above a township collective of box-and-triangle cabins and buildings that was quaintly named Basso Profundo by some alcoholic nineteenth-century opera-loving wag. But, missurveyed, caved in, hidden, grown over, one of the dozens of jutting chins of strangely beautiful red-orange and mustard tailings that spilled down into the aspen and bristlecone pine on either side of Horseshoe Basin, the Blue Lark stubbornly refused to reveal itself.

  Perhaps predictably, bOOmerbust had disconnected his phone and stopped answering Lee’s emails as soon as he had his money; Lee imagined some slick thirty-five-year-old land speculator crafting the grizzled, baked-bean narrative in a Denver wine bar with a couple of friends, and he fully intended to give strongly worded, bad feedback on the online auction site, and a zero-star rating. His outrage was short-lived, however, because just finding the mine was a huge part of the voyage, as far as Lee was concerned. Finding it, opening it, exploring it, imagining all the immigrants and hard, desperate men and all the dreams that had been there before him. Finding it. An indifferent woman who worked at the Summit County Assessor’s office had assured him that the land existed, and that the land was Lee’s, and, let’s be honest, caveat emptor, not the seller’s responsibility to locate for Lee unless he specifically made that a condition of sale, which he had not done.

  It was a sullen, muggy Saturday when Lee finally poked his way carefully around and through the collapsing mine buildings he’d somehow missed on his first six trips up the mountain. Exploring the ruins of blackened sluice planking, rotted post and beam, silvery wood siding, and squandered hope, Lee wisely tested the floorboards before he walked on them; shadows and empty spaces implied an elegiac history that may have been, in fact, simply brutal days of pointless labor ending in failure, the whole array probably one gust away from total collapse. An early summer squall was rumbling and gathering itself in the thermals around Torey’s Peak, promising to come in hard from the south, its stiff new winds tugging at the plat map Lee tried to keep flat in his hands.

  This time, Lee had hiked straight up from where he parked his Jeep at the switchback instead of walking the rutted road that snaked through the National Forest. This tumble-down collection of ruins hidden in the stunted trees was not anywhere near where the map appeared to have the mine sited, but Lee knew from his casual library reading on gold-rush mining claims that it was common for the old surveys to be done purposefully wrong in order to conceal, from the unsavory characters a gold mine was likely to attract, the true location of the strike. Or, even more likely, that it had been made in an office, site unseen, by a couple of rummed-up Federal Homestead Act office staffers and the original patent holder himself, based loosely on the claim stak-er’s description because, if it hit, he’d have it all done over professionally to protect his rights, and if it didn’t, well, who would ever care?

  Fat raindrops smacked Lee as he walked out to the edge of a wooden deck that hung out over the mountainside. He could see over the treetops, across the valley to the skeletal ruins of the St. John’s Mine stamping plant, once the richest lode on the Front Range, with over three hundred employees and a foreman who had all his teeth capped gold with just the leavings that sluiced out of the placer troughs. Lee watched the grey and black whorl of the gathering storm. A drapery of rain hung down from the clouds five miles south. Forest stretched unbroken to the ski slopes of Keystone, then west to Dillon and the shores of the reservoir. The few scattered structures that comprised Basso Profundo Township were directly below him: the peeling asbestos shingles, the dry-rotted steeple of the old Baptist Church, the dark opening of the abandoned mechanic’s bay at Shorty’s Conoco, a sliver of its luminous white sign. The patched aluminum rooftop of the General Store glinted crenulated sunlight back up the mountain. Once this town had supported thirty-five hundred people. Now there were, maybe, twenty-three.

  A rushing stillness overwhelmed him, as it always did when he hiked in the Rockies. Wind untiring in the trees, relentless, the breath of God across the rock and grass and crooked fingers of drizzling snowmelt. And sky. Colorado was all about sky, everywhere, the yawning vault of heaven, the infinite blue of it. Lee wiped away tears. The altitude, the mountains, their immutability, his own insignificance, and that sky. Strangely, everything seemed possible here. Life opened up before Lee like an unfulfilled promise, left him breathless, dizzy, yearning, unmoored.

  For what?

  Not gold.

  Meanwhile: Thunder. The wind rising; the trees hushed. A Clark’s nutcracker’s shrill khraa khraa khraa.

  Lee tucked the map away, turned to go, took one step, and the wood planks gave way beneath his feet. He yelped and disappeared down into the dark splintering hole in a clatter of debris and obscenities as the rainstorm came hurrying in.

  The cashier behind the General Store counter looked to be completely enthralled by the latest National Enquirer, and the unplanned pregnancy of another underage and auto-tuned pop singer she’d never heard of, when Lee came in, warning bells tripped by the open door and sounding more like a loose collection of metal parts than anything remotely musical. Outside, the rain fell in fuzzy sheets. Lee ducked behind the sunglasses rack and was halfway down aisle two when Rayna Lincoln finally glanced up from her tabloid. She could see just enough of her new customer in the concave security mirror mounted high on the back wall. He didn’t appear to be a robber or a shoplifter or a mass murderer, so she resumed reading until boxes of Band-Aids spilled out on the checkout counter in front of her.

  “Do you have antibacterial topicals, besides the gel kinds?”

  Rayna was pretty enough, and knew it, and had made her peace with it, and the steady cast of her hazel eyes said she didn’t want to think it mattered much, but understood that, in this world, it did. Lee was all scraped up, wet, dirty, his forehead was bleeding, but she liked him right away.

  “Whatja do to yourself?”

  “Oh.” Lee’s hands fluttered meaninglessly. “You know.”

  “No.” She saw the wedding ring on his finger but none of her usual alarms went off, which, she thought, was weird.

  Lee just tried to wait her out.

  “No, really.”

  “I fell,” Lee admitted finally.

  “Fell.”

  “Yeah. Down,” he added unnecessarily.

  A short, awkward silence ensued. This was all the explanation Rayna was going to get, she guessed.

  “You got something against gels?”

  “They’re oily,” Lee said.

  Now Rayna waited.

  “I have rips and tears all over,” Lee said.

  “There might be an old case of Mercurochrome in back,” she told him. “It’s not legal for me to sell it to you,” she advised, “on account of the trace mercury content which the FDA got nervous about—Hunter-Russell syndrome, acrodyinia, Minamata disease, and so forth—but I don’t see why you can’t just use it. At your own risk. You know. If you want.”

  Rayna pretended to go back to her magazine as Lee frowned and then told her that his mother had used Mercurochrome on his and his little brother’s perennial failed-Ollie lacerations and abrasions, “without any long-term toxic effects.”

  “Yet,” Rayna said.

  “I never got the hang of skateboards,” Lee admitted. “My little brother got fairly decent.”

  Rayna hiked her jeans up as she came out from behind the cashier’s counter so he wouldn’t be staring down her butt crack as she led him into the storeroom; her knockoff designer jeans looked fine in JC Penney’s but were not cut to fit anything but the boyish booty of those anorexic fifteen-year-old meth addicts who aspired to be America’s Next Top Model—normal gals with standard equipmen
t need not apply. She found the Mercurochrome box where she thought it would be, and by the time she got it down and sliced it open with her box cutter, Lee had his shirt off, revealing more cuts and scrapes on a surprisingly lean, nicely cut torso (not that Rayna dwelled on it) for a straight white man (which at this point she only assumed he was), and she watched, oddly fascinated, while Lee proceeded to dab bright red mercuric iodide on his wounds and then cover them with Band-Aids, as if she wasn’t there.

  Not exactly a shy guy, but he didn’t talk or flirt with her either.

  “Does that sting?”

  Lee looked up at her, and really looked this time, as though he hadn’t even seen her before.

  “No. Not (ow) not too bad. It’s (ow) just, this dropper, it’s a little awk—(OW!)” He flinched, fumbled the applicator, and got dusted pointillist with tiny dots of Mercurochrome when it fell to the tabletop. “Dammit.”

  “You want some help?”

  “No.” Pause. “Well, sure. Yes.” He fumbled with the idea for a moment longer. “Maybe just here, with my back.”

  Rayna cautiously took up the Mercurochrome applicator from the mess of Lee’s Band-Aid leavings and remoistened it. Lee tensed up, turned, put his back to her, and she resumed the dabbing and dressing of the scrapes from his fall.

  Neither one of them said anything for a while. The alcohol of the tincture felt cool against Lee’s skin, and Rayna’s hands moved lightly. He relaxed.

  Lee’s gaze wandered across the supplies carefully organized and stacked up in the storeroom.

  “You carry mining equipment?”

  “Why? You got a mine?”

  Lee had to determine first whether she was teasing him. He decided she wasn’t. “Well, actually, yes. That’s how I got hurt, I—”

  “Where?”