Finally, the much anticipated morning came when Juan and Willy left town and found themselves barreling down the highway, heading east, aiming the nose of their truck directly at the red eye of the rising sun.
It felt good to be on the road and to have left their jerky jobs at Jipson’s place, perhaps forever, if they would be lucky enough to discover a large quantity of gold. They liked thinking of themselves as part of the great history of Arizona and Arizona mining. Juan and Willy were ignorant of the actual great history of mining, culture and commerce in Arizona. They didn’t know a thing about all its hokum and bunk, the pageant of cowboys, conquistadors and padres, the overgrazed meadows, the monstrous Kachinas, the patina of haciendas, the dusty roundups, the stallions stampeding and the fortunes made with massive machines and ball bearings crunching, crunching, all the time crunching the mountains with mighty western hammers, hammers much mightier than any sissy eastern hammers, pounding out ore, pounding by the hour, hour after hour, smashing the ore to smithereens, smelting it and pouring it into wiggling troughs of shimmering bubbles to be skimmed and fired and molded into shining ingots and later to be cast into statues of cattle and cowboys, padres and conquistadors searching ever more for their golden mines, of all of that, of the great meaningless circle of copper, cotton, cattle and commerce and the meager cultural history of their woe-begotten native state, of the larger meaning or lack of meaning of Arizona.
They were also ignorant of the basic operation of this earth, which is pretty hard to figure out and maybe it’s smarter to think that some wonderful ingot might just stand in the way of your big toe than to think that it won’t. You could say that it’s part of man’s nature to be a miner and scrape the earth’s crust and trudge around glaring at the rocks and the soil beneath him for a treasure that he thinks might be lying there waiting just for him to trip over. Of course, some early miners got eaten by big cats or killed by their enemies because they were looking at the ground instead of the trail ahead or because they were poking around in a canyon or a cave. But early man must have stared at rocks a lot and must have done that a long time ago or he wouldn’t have gone through all those ages named for metals such as the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Yes, man will go into a hole after a metal only to fall into an open shaft quite happily, well, not exactly happily, but feeling satisfaction at having found it: his mine.
The only bad thing about their departure had been that Jipson seemed relieved to see them take a week off, and before they left, he talked of nothing but how much better the two, new dishwashers were. Sometimes he had no loyalty toward his cousin. Sonia hardly said anything about their week long camping trip, though she admired the truck and seemed relieved that she would not be cajoled into giving them rides home any more.
“It don’t matter,” said Juan. “We are on our ways to getting rich. I will soon have my chromed-over motorcycle to go to Puerto Penesco and take you along with me, guey. We’ll have a real vacation and stay in the finest hotel in the upper gulf. We’ll find some nice chicas down there, my friend, sweet ladies. Puerto Penesco has some of the best ladies, the nicest personalities. I might spend a whole month down there when I’m rich. I will eat in the best restaurant and order whatever I want off the menu. We could order big steaks; they have them there.”
After a few hours travel, when they had passed the halfway mark to the border with New Mexico, they came to their exit and headed the truck off the highway onto a paved road, a little-used road that had long cracks across it. A sign noted their twenty-five mile proximity to the Massacre Mountains, and Juan and Willy smiled broadly at that. They were relieved, and frankly a little astonished, that the truck had run at speed without a glitch.
A beat-up, washboard dirt road branched off of the paved road about an hour later and they found themselves banging along an area with scrub oaks covering the low hills. For the umpteenth time, Juan consulted their map, from the U.S. Geological Survey, and the little scrap of paper they had found in the blue book they had stolen from his mother. “Soon we will be in the vicinity of the Mine of the Babbling Padre,” Juan said. “We have to figure out which turn leads us into this,” Juan pointed with his finger where he had drawn a circle, “Depredation Gulch. There don’t seem to be markers.”
Turning, turning, turning, the roads they took seemed to be leading them toward the hills ahead, the Massacre Mountains, named by the Babbling Padre. They were surprised, however, a few times when, at a junction, the road they chose led them plunging into a dead end in an arroyo. Then, backtracking, they seemed to be getting somewhat closer to the mountains. The roads in the foothills were even rougher than those in the flats and the truck tossed them around to no end.
In the midst of fighting the wheel to control the truck, a terrible thing happened. As they bottomed out in a dry stream bed, their metal detector flew right off the back of the truck and broke into three pieces! When they got out they noticed two boxes of food must have flown off before. When they backtracked they couldn’t find that food. Yes, they should have strapped it down; Juan admitted that was a big screw-up of his.
“You fuckin idiot,” said Willy, falling on Juan’s neck.
“Ayeeeee! Get off me, you chango fucker!”
They fought each other, as was their custom, by throwing things from the truck at each other. They also threw each other into bushes and tried to knock the other one off their feet. They broke some more equipment and wasted daylight.
Finally, they gave up the fight and returned, happily, to the truck.
Willy, who still didn’t have his license reinstated, took a turn at the wheel, but neither of them were experienced off-roaders so they jarred their backs and sides. Willy was afraid he had bent the axle about ten times and he stopped so he could check it over and over again. Of course, Juan made comments about how much of a worrier Willy was and how all Anglos were like that and of course none of that went over well with Willy who was still smarting from the high school mix-up.
Finally, late that afternoon of the first day, the Massacre Mountains, which they were heading into, took better shape. They looked desolate. Juan and Willy hadn’t seen a human home, even an abandoned one, in hours.
Here was a perfect example of the ruined Arizona you never see in Arizona Roadways Magazine. The photos in that magazine show nothing but pretty pictures here, and beautiful spots there, with a bunch of way sick waterfalls splashing around heaping boulders and lots of attractive leaves floating on bubbly turquoise water. That magazine makes the reader think ‘Oh snap! moving to Arizona will land me in clean oak canyons with candy-striped cliffs and the whole place will be some kind of Dream State and if I move there, I will have a clear shot at heaven on earth and will reach a bunch of my lifetime goals while enjoying the great outdoors.’ But in Arizona Roadways they don’t show the worn out shacks some in Arizona live in and the rusty appliances heaped up to form garden walls and they sure as hell don’t show the ruined holes, the open pits, where the copper mines once were and left after dumping mercury and acids over most of the soil. They don’t shoot pictures of the rusting mine equipment and the weeds growing over the abandoned towns that are supposed to be so damn picturesque, and they don’t tell how the big land speculators took land away from people left, right, and center across the state. They don’t show that in Arizona Roadways.
A lot of people actually living in Arizona think the place is glamorous but that is because they never go anywhere off the beaten track to the really wrecked places or they are living off the fruits of the earlier bastards who were here a long time ago. The truth is there are more down and outs altogether in Arizona than anyone would care to know. Mexicans and Anglo bastards like Juan and Willy and their great granddaddies, who were out in Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico a hundred years ago when the Natives were busy trying to get rid of them, and there were no air conditioners, they see the whole set-up different. They see through the sham of it. Most who were from Arizona and had been from Arizona for a long time hadn’t got any air c
onditioners still because they haven’t got money to pay the big effin electricity bills you get when you get an air conditioner. And why don’t they swing that and get air conditioners? That is as a result of getting every bit of ambition zapped out of them by all the sweat they sweated every summer when it was one hundred degrees for one hundred days and they were working balls out without effin air conditioning. Check it out! Yes, poor Mexicans and poor Americans sweating without air conditioning have been friends for a long time in Arizona but they had to put up with each other.
But Juan and Willy’s great-great-grandparents somehow made it to Southern Arizona. To their misfortune. Arizona has been a right-to-work state and what that really means is a poor person has gotta right, and maybe even a duty, to starve. All the fine views, the fine rides, and the no-work jobs belong to the wealthy sons-of-bitches who move here each year from someplace else. They close off the trails into the mountains and drive up the price of living in the hills or any other choice layouts they find. Then, with right-to-work in place, nobody can make any union dues get paid and help the wages go up a teensy bit with a strike.
Is there a way out of this sucking place they were born in, you might ask? Well, if you are a poor man in this state you might start thinking ‘Oh snap! how sick it would be if I could strike it rich in the hills someday before I keel over and die on a one hundred degree day.’ Because Arizona is hiding minerals and valuable crystal specimens all over the place, under mountains and way up in rocky far-away canyons, and person like Juan or Willy might have visions of an El Dorado or something and imagine that the living will be easy for him and his friends and his family when his fabulous mine is found and the tons of gold brought in and weighed and well, they might strike it rich, maybe, and Juan and Willy thought that but that is basically total crap. The stuff might be there, and it is, but no poor man is going to get it easily, not easily. The world doesn’t work that way for Juans or Willys.
The truth is that while he is living and breathing and walking around on this earth, a man has got to find a way to survive from day to day. That is his biggest job from sunup to sundown. Since some of us don’t got the breaks of others and we have to do some dangerous things to survive. We have got to do some dangerous things to get ahead or even to get along in a so-so fashion, but actually a poor man has to do a lot worse things than you can imagine, although a rich man will always find a way to make what should be a safe idea unsafe for everybody else through his natural greed. The ideas for getting rich left for a poor man after the rich man has taken his share are pretty much all unsafe anyway, unsafe for him and unsafe for the rest of humanity that have to be around when the invention explodes or the mineshaft collapses or the crane falls ten stories, Ka-boom, on some fool’s head.
The lure of gold in ancient times was about as strong as it is today. With the price going up past sixteen hundred bucks the lure was even stronger and Juan and Willy were not the only ones in Arizona to fall under its spell. Certain people nowadays in Arizona are eager to fall into mineshafts and to become suspicious of their fellow man always thinking he’s got the jump on them and wants his digs which he probably does, but actually with Juan and Willy they ended up wanting someone to find them because where Juan took Willy was so far back in the effin boonies that they couldn’t get help when they needed it, but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Mining attracted Juan and Willy for all the usual reasons such as sounding like easy work compared to what Jipson wanted from them at Bess Tacos. Mining appeals to people who think, work? Not today, thank you kindly. The fun of pulling out a big fat golden lump of gold caught in the knot of a root of a cottonwood tree just about exceeds the pain in the ass when your boss rips you another asshole over your nonstop screw-ups. This has been the case since time immemorial.
So it comes to be that Juan and Willy needed to know the history of mining in Arizona, which is very interesting, and which they didn’t know any of, actually. Not where gold and silver had been found, or what the mountains were like where gold could be found, or the type of minerals you need to find to find gold and so on. They were ignorant of all that. Nor did they really know much about how to recognize minerals, not which minerals stick together or how to pull them apart or where they had already been yanked out of the ground. Mr. Franklin’s DVD’s were not much help, either. Juan and Willy would also have been surprised to know the amount of equipment that they needed to mine that they didn’t know about. Most of Mr. Franklin’s equipment was actually crap.
Their understanding of chemicals and geology was hopeless and all they were going on was some murky hope that they would stub their toes of a big gob of gold. And they were using that book of the babbling padre with the scribbled Spanish on the page. They were trusting that crazy page that had fallen out of the book they had taken from Juan’s mother.