A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar Read online

  The baby climbed her leg and made its noises: “Bah bah bah bah BAH?” She ignored it, busy with the dishes in the sink. Beachum made a mental note to Google intelligence-enhancing techniques for toddlers. His sister’s oldest had listened to Beethoven while the fetus was still in vitro, and now the kid was at some exclusive egghead boarding school in Gstaad, studying cello and nearly fluent in three languages. Switzerland!

  “I’m just saying,” Beachum said.

  He’d had a chance to invest in the Baby Beethoven thing, but that was back when P&Ls were supposed to make some kind of sense, so he’d backed off, and missed out. The stock had gone through the roof before science came along and debunked most of the popular myths about the benefits of prenatal stimulation with case studies and facts. If a man had invested early and got out before the whole thing crashed . . .

  Beachum’s wife turned to him with her Skeptical Face. She was the most attractive woman who had ever acknowledged him, and he knew she didn’t love him but it didn’t matter. Beachum was transactional; this wife was a good investment, confirmation of his virility, a long-term asset that you simply held and let appreciate.

  “I am ready if he does choose to come back here, though,” Beachum reassured her.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, continuing to look skeptical, which stressed him.

  “It just means I’m ready.”

  “Ready how?”

  “Ready in every way,” he said, hoping not to get backed into a corner again. He pushed up from the table. “Ready Freddy,” he joked, smiling at the small, possibly developmentally challenged (dear God) child hugging his wife’s left leg.

  The baby burst into tears.

  EIGHT

  Lee had never experienced a darkness as absolute and oppressive as that first pitiless, soundless gloaming in the Blue Lark Mine. Thirty feet in, looking back, the outside world had shrunk to a rectangle of dazzling light, already strange and remote. The headlight on his surplus store miner’s helmet knifed forward through the humid air, but darkness pressed in all around it and gave the illusion that what its beam captured was all that existed, shifting as his head moved, whatever it left behind lost to the darkness, no longer real.

  Bent over and struggling to keep her balance, Mayor Barbara stayed close behind Lee, and Doug trailed behind them both, still talking:

  “ . . . four years before his death, Creede was accused of arranging the murder of the man who held the mortgage on his father’s farm when the man refused to allow Creede to pay the note. The charges appeared in anonymous letters addressed to Mr. Creede care of the notorious Rocky Mountain News reporter E. Jarvis Cassini,” Doug explained. “Creede claimed they were blackmail.”

  “Does he ever effing run out of juice?” Barb asked Lee.

  “He’s got a big tank,” Lee said.

  “My second husband was a talker,” Barb mused. Her headlamp futzed on and off schizophrenically. “When he died, I had them sew his mouth shut in case he got the urge to deliver his own eulogy from, you know, the box.”

  Lee didn’t think she was kidding.

  “One of the accusers surfaced sometime later.” Doug’s voice, bouncing brittle off the hard facets of the rock: “Found dead in a Pullman sleeping car in Wilson, Kansas. There was never a connection made to Creede.”

  “It’s a mine for midgets,” Barb complained, ignoring him now. Even the mayor had to crouch, as she followed Lee, to avoid banging her helmet on the chiseled stone. The shaft was about five feet in height.

  “No, no. Historically,” Doug explained to her, “this part was dug by Welshmen. And they’re short.”

  “They are not. Sean Connery is Welsh, and look at him.”

  “He’s a Scot,” Doug said.

  “Still. He was the best Bond.”

  “It looks like it opens up just ahead,” Lee said.

  He kept moving, slowly, bent-over, surprised at the sloppy wetness of the tunnel, everything dripping, boots moiling through the shin-deep mud, and making lewd sucking sounds. Sure enough, another thirty feet and they could stand up straight; a head tilted back revealed, in the light beam, a cavern now thirty feet in height, with timbers crisscrossing it every which way, a latticework of support beams that suggested this part had been mined or had collapsed.

  Silt-water ribboned down from the roof shadows; the walls glowed weird and slick. Lee reached out. Doug and the Mayor were still close behind him, afraid to stray. His hand, palm flat, pressed into the wall and disappeared. Deeper, deeper, halfway to his elbow in a wall seemingly made of mud.

  “Jesus,” Barb said, creeped-out.

  “What?”

  Suddenly Lee jerked back, tried to pull it out, and screamed as if something had hold of his hand.

  “It’s got me! Run! Run!”

  Barbara and Doug turned and collided, Keystone Kops. Doug yelled, pushed her, Barbara’s boots slipped, Lee caught her. He smiled, pulled his hand and arm out of the goo.

  “Kidding,” he said.

  “Oh boy,” Doug wheezed, “shoot, oh man, oh man. Don’t do that. Don’t.” They both glared at Lee, unamused.

  “Sorry.” Lee wandered further into the mine. Doug and Barb hung back; they didn’t trust him now. For a moment, there was only the soughing of their boots in the mud, the rustle of their clothing, and the soft huff of breathing.

  “There’s another shaft here that intersects,” Lee called back to them, but they couldn’t see it, only the beam of Lee’s helmet light and a faint ghost of his pink face beneath it.

  “I’m going back outside,” Barb said. She turned to walk out, and Doug turned to watch her, and his eyes got big.

  “There it is,” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell you? Look at that pooch! Place is lined with pure gold!”

  To the Mayor’s right, where the mine first widened and cut taller, in the light from Doug’s helmet, the sloping ceiling seemed studded with fat golden nuggets gleaming back at them. Doug sloshed impulsively forward, shoving past Barbara, falling to his hands and knees again, and crawling the last five feet, pulling himself up, clawing the rock wall to reach up to the glittering roof of the mine just over his head and discovered:

  “Drops of water,” Doug said with disappointment.

  Drops of water that ran down Doug’s hand when he touched them. Fat drops that plunked to his helmet, shorting out the light with a fizzling sound, and plunged him into a terrible twilight lit only by the distant square of egress at the end of the short, Welsh-cut mine opening.

  “Water. It’s just water.”

  “I thought mines were supposed to be bone dry.” Mayor Barbara was wet and disgusted. She looked for Lee, as if it was his fault. But Lee was back at the tunnel junction, and he had his head up, assessing the overhead timbers of the big room.

  “You know, before we do anything, we’re really going to have to shore all these up,” he said.

  Clanking sounds came from deep in the mine, down in the mountain, spooking the Mayor.

  “There’s somebody in here.”

  “Tommyknockers,” Doug told her.

  “Tommywhat?”

  “Mine ghosts. Actual sound of the mountain, shifting. Rocks groaning. In the old days the miners said they were the ghosts of buried miners, calling for help, trying to get out. Or warning us about cave-ins,” he added ominously.

  As abruptly as it started, the knocking stopped.

  “You know way too much about this stuff,” Mayor Barb told Doug. She was ready to leave.

  “I know way too much about way too much,” Doug confessed, somewhat immodestly. He reached up to slap one of the huge timbers right over his head, continuing, “Lee, I hate to contradict you, but these timbers have been here a hundred years, and I promise you, they ain’t going nowhere.”

  The sodden, rough-hewn beam he slapped shifted slightly, sending a load of loose rock above it showering down on them; the sound of that rockfall mostly drowned out the sound of Doug and Barbara screaming as they hauled ass toward
daylight, crouched over, duck-legged, boots sliding in the mud. Lee, no fool, was right behind them, but not screaming. At the entrance, more dust and mud and rock and wood were sliding in from outside, almost in slow motion, but creating a worrisome impediment to their exit. Lee grabbed Barbara and lifted her off her feet, under his arm, pushed past Doug (whose screaming was causing him to lose some pace), and carried the Mayor through the swiftly diminishing strait of cannonading dirt and stone, stumbled out into the blazing sunshine, and didn’t stop until he was standing in the shallow ochre pond that had formed in front of the mine at the end of the trench. Lee carefully put Barbara down and steadied her. She brushed limp hair out of her eyes with a clean spot on the crook of her wrist. Doug waddled out of the mine a moment later, missing a boot, still screaming incoherently, and covered so thoroughly with mud and dust that he was primal. The topsoil had stopped caving into the mine. It was, now that they were out of it, a minor backfill, a simple settling of the new excavation that looked to be not nearly as deadly as it had seemed from inside.

  The three gazed back at the mine opening in silence, as if trying to make sense of it.

  Then Lee smiled. And started to laugh. He laughed loudly, relieved, exhilarated, alive.

  It didn’t take long for Doug and the Mayor, irreversibly entangled in the venture now, Lee knew, to join in.

  Of course later, when he learned of it, Lee felt horrible about and completely responsible for the water damage to Rayna’s store. He spent the next weekend helping her muck out the yellow goop and scrub the gritty residue off the floors and walls with sudsy buckets of Barb’s Amway flagship multipurpose Liquid Organic Cleaner after the goop had dried. Lee was helping her in the sense that Rayna sat behind the checkout counter while he mopped and swept and cleaned and ordered supplies that Rayna tallied up on a shipping document.

  “A case of ten-penny nails . . . ”

  “Mayor Barb says you’re a high school teacher.”

  “Four dozen galvanized steel tie-downs . . . ”

  “My mom taught second grade, before she had kids.”

  “Twenty twelve-bys . . .”

  “Thanks for helping me clean up.”

  “No, check that: twenty-five.” He looked up at her. “Those come in sixteen-foot lengths?”

  Occasionally when he looked up, he found himself meeting her level gaze; she had been staring at him, not writing. More than once when this happened, his heart juddered like a schoolboy’s, and he thought: What the fuck? This time, however, she was studying her list.

  “What’s your wife have to say about your gold mine?” Rayna asked.

  “We don’t know it’s a gold mine,” Lee said, fazed. “And, anyway,” he clarified, “she, my wife, doesn’t say anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “No, ex-wife, not, no, anymore.”

  “Ooo. Is that English?” Now of course she glanced up at him.

  “Divorced, is what I’m trying to say. I mean. I’m. Me. Not married. How did you—?”

  “The ring.”

  And, as if cued from offstage, Lee twisted his wedding band nervously. “Ah. Right.”

  Rayna was immediately apologetic: “Sorry. Sorry. It’s just . . . my radar’s up. Kind of a rebound thing.”

  She held up her own left hand. No ring.

  “From what?”

  “The new me,” she said, not answering the question.

  “From the new you?” Lee was confused.

  “No.”

  “Were you married?”

  “Not exactly.” Then: “How many twelve-bys?”

  “Mine won’t come off,” Lee told her. “Honest to God.” Lee held up his hand, wiggling the finger. “It’s stuck.”

  “Metaphor?”

  “I teach shop,” Lee said, frowning, fazed again.

  Rayna waited for Lee to catch up; she chewed on the end of her pen as if she couldn’t have cared less whether he was married or not. A sort of comfortable silence settled between them, and for once Lee didn’t try to figure out what it meant or ruin it. He resumed sweeping.

  A graphite-grey Range Rover came up the street, slowly, and inside it a couple of tawny faces turned, nearly in unison, to look into the store at Lee, their eyes preternaturally white even behind the extra-dark faux-gangsta tint of the Rover windows. Its chrome hubcaps spun past, gone.

  “Five hundred feet of nine-gauge electrical wire,” Lee had resumed ordering, “four dozen clip-on lights . . . ”

  “You could cut it off.”

  Stopping, mid-sweep: “What?”

  “You could cut the ring off,” Rayna said. “How long have you been divorced?”

  There was another, but less comfortable, silence born of a strange, probing intimacy Lee hadn’t felt in a long time.

  The Range Rover had turned around and was coming back. This time Lee looked back at the faces of the two men staring out at him. They were, what, holy moly if they weren’t Indian, as in not Native American, as in factory-direct from Mumbai, but sporting fancy cowboy-cut dress shirts that fit their narrow shoulders as if they were tailored. Framed by the windows of a Range Rover, Indians on the main street of Basso Profundo, a complete non sequitur, and then gone.

  “Lee?”

  “Fourteen months. Fourteen months since it was final. Look, do we have to talk about this?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  Rayna’s eyes fell, her head inclined, and she studied the order form. Lee looked out the window at nothing and wished he hadn’t said what he just said. He did want to talk about it. He wanted to talk to Rayna about it, but now she wouldn’t even look up at him.

  “I should probably get some duct tape,” Lee said finally. Rayna, nodding, writing it down, agreed, observing dryly that there probably wasn’t a project worth doing that didn’t involve duct tape.

  THE SPECTER OF WANT AND DISASTER

  NINE

  THE KANSAS CITY STAR METRO SECTION, PAGE 10B, BELOW THE FOLD:SALINA MAN FOUND HANGED IN BASEMENT

  by Ainsy Farrow

  Exclusive to The Star

  It was a smell that Marissa Dbrovna had hoped she would someday forget. The perfume of death, a body in decay, wafting through her kitchen window on morning breezes, she was sure of it. But it took her four days to convince the Salina police to send a car and checkw it out.

  Yesterday morning, Patrolmen Bob Flynn and Stuart Nelson forced entry and found an elderly man hanging from a clothesline noose in the basement of a rust-brick house in the 2200 block of Logan Street.

  The Salina County Coroner estimates the victim had been dead for eight to ten days. Cause of death was strangulation. The name of the victim is being withheld until authorities can find and notify his next of kin.

  Neighbors who gathered on the sidewalk in front of the crime scene spoke of a lively, gregarious septuagenarian who loved to regale them with stories of his purported adventures as a modern-day gold miner in the mountains of Colorado and Utah.

  “He just recently sold a darn mine on eBay, if you can believe it,” Mikey Lowell said. “Over thirty thousand bucks, I saw the darn check. Either that, or he was really good at lying.”

  For Dbrovna, a soft-spoken woman “well into” her forties, the smell of the ripening corpse was a chilling reminder of a 1993 massacre in Ahmici, Herzegovina, a largely Bosniak village from which Dbrovna fled more than a decade ago. Over a period of several hours, Croat soldiers murdered at least 120 villagers, including women and children, in the culmination of the Lasva Valley Ethnic Cleansing Campaign. A subsequent war crimes trial at The Hague resulted in numerous verdicts against high-ranking Croat military leaders, and even some politicians.

  “Men shot at point-blank,” Dbrovna remembered. “Houses set fire to with flame launchers. Much with the raping. Children, their little bodies charred.

  “I hid in a smoking shed,” she said. “I saw it with my eyes. Two mosques even in Donji, blown up with the explosives.”

  Dbrovna did not know the neighbor who hange
d himself, despite living next door to him.

  “We were hand-waving friends,” she explained. “Taking the garbage, there he is, make to wave. You know. Coming and going, hello, wave. But we did not talk of things, even small things, no.

  “And now he is gone. It’s horrible.”

  Police officials and scientific investigation technicians were observed going in and out of the house throughout the day and into the night. Salina Police Department Spokesperson Missy Holiman said the investigation is ongoing.

  TEN

  Downtown Evergreen was as he remembered it, just a slowed-down, two-lane stretch of Highway 74, at the confluence of the Cub and Bear Creeks, a narrow canyon lined with shops and businesses trying hard to stay rustic. The plumbing truck rolled to a stop at the single stoplight on the highway, and as it idled there, Grant slid out of the back with his nylon bag, slapped the fender, and waved goodbye to the driver, whose name he’d already forgotten, and who, grinning back at Grant from the big side mirror, stuck one hairy arm out the window, and aimed his waggling fat thumb skyward.

  Grant dodged through traffic to the covered sidewalk in front of The Little Bear. He was welcomed home by a pretty discouraging, greasy blast of hot, beefalo burger barbecue smog, blown down from the kitchen vents by a swirling breeze, but he did not go inside. Through the open door he could hear what he worried was a B-side Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song, and he thought he saw, in the saloon gloom, a few familiar faces sucking the early beer and arguing about anything. He had not thought about The Little Bear during his one year, eight months, and twenty-seven days away. He hadn’t thought about Evergreen at all, one way or the other. It was not in the chemistry of Grant’s genome to dwell on the past or in the past; his was always forward movement, and not so much purposeful or deliberate as inevitable, like the tornado on the horizon or the drunk driver crossing into your lane. Forward, in this case, meant uphill, skirting the highway, through the new retail development designed to cater to the continuous growth of the commuter population; Evergreen had begun as a logging camp, and then a trading post so that miners from Idaho Springs and Bailey could save three days and avoid a trip to Denver or Golden. For the first half of the twentieth century, it thrived as a tourist town with cabins for rent and a man-made lake and a number of swank alpine hotel resorts. But the interstate that cut through the Front Range to the north opened up the entire area to Denver developers looking for prime mountain acreage on which to build the kind of quarter-acre-of-heaven Colorado exurbs that Denver yuppies and rednecks and ex-hippies all craved after a few years in what Lee liked to call “Omaha with a Mountain View.”