Desperation

  He looked at her with raised eyebrows. "Who elected you Temperance Queen?"

  "You shithead," she hissed. "Don't you think I know who got him started? Don't you think I saw?"

  She started toward Tom, but Johnny pulled her back and went himself. He heard her little gasp of pain and supposed he might have squeezed her wrist a little harder than was exactly gentlemanly. Well, he wasn't used to being called a shithead. He had won a National Book Award, after all. He had been on the cover of Time. He had also fucked America's sweetheart (well, maybe that was sort of retroactive, or something, she hadn't really been America's sweetheart since 1965 or so, but he had still fucked her), and he wasn't used to being called a shithead. Yet, Mary had a point. He, a man not unacquainted with the highways and byways of Alcoholics Anonymous, had nevertheless given that kiddy favorite, Mr. Drunken Doggy Doctor, his first shot of the evening. He'd thought it would pull Billingsley together, get him focused (and they had needed him focused, it was his town, after all) ... but hadn't he also been a teeny-tiny bit pissed off at the tosspot vet awarding himself a loaded gun while The National Book Award Kid had to be contented with an unloaded .22?

  No. No, dammit, the gun wasn't the issue. Keeping the old man wired together enough to be of some help, that was the issue.

  Well, maybe. Maybe. It felt a little bogus, but you had to give yourself the benefit of the doubt in some situations--especially the crazy ones, which this certainly was. Either way, it maybe hadn't been such a good idea. He had had a large number of not-such-good-ideas in his life, and if anyone was qualified to recognize one when he saw it, John Edward Marinville was probably that fellow.

  "Why don't we save that for later, Tom?" he said, and smoothly plucked the glass of whiskey out of the vet's hand just as he was bringing it to his lips.

  "Hey!" Billingsley cawed, making a swipe at it. His eyes were more watery than ever, and now threaded with bright red stitches that looked like tiny cuts. "Gimme that!"

  Johnny held it away from him, up by his own mouth, and felt a sudden, appallingly strong urge to take care of the problem in the quickest, simplest way. Instead, he put the glass on top of the bar, where ole Tommy wouldn't be able to reach it unless he jumped around to one side or the other. Not that he didn't think Tommy was capable of jumping for a drink; ole Tommy had gotten to a point where he would probably try to fart "The Marine Hymn" if someone promised him a double. Meantime, the others were watching, Mary rubbing her wrist (which was red, he observed--but just a little, really no big deal).

  "Gimme!" Billingsley bawled, and stretched out one hand toward the glass on top of the bar, opening and closing his fingers like an angry baby that wants its sucker back. Johnny suddenly remembered how the actress--the one with the emeralds, the one who had been America's number one honeybunny in days of yore, so sweet sugar wouldn't melt in her snatch--had once pushed him into the pool at the Bel-Air, how everyone had laughed, how he himself had laughed as he came out dripping, with his bottle of beer still in his hand, too drunk to know what was happening, that the flushing sound he heard was the remainder of his reputation going down the shitter. Yes sir and yes ma'am, there he had been on that hot day in Los Angeles, laughing like mad in his wet Pierre Cardin suit, bottle of Bud upraised in one hand like a trophy, everyone else laughing right along with him; they were all having a great old time, he had been pushed into the pool just like in a movie and they were having a great old time, hardy-har and hideyho, welcome to the wonderful world of too drunk to know better, let's see you write your way out of this one, Marinville.

  He felt a burst of shame that was more for himself than for Tom, although he knew it was Tom they were looking at (except for Mary, who was still making a big deal of her wrist), Tom who was still saying "Gimme that baack!" while he clenched and unclenched his hand like Baby Fucking Huey, Tom who was already shot on only three drinks. Johnny had seen this before, too; after a certain number of years spent swimming around in the bottle, drinking everything in sight and yet seeming to remain almost stone-sober, your booze-gills had this weird tendency to suddenly seal themselves shut at almost the first taste. Crazy but true. See the amazing Late-Stage Alcoholic, folks, step right up, you won't believe your eyes.

  He put an arm around Tom, leaned into the brown aroma of Dant that hung around the man's head like a fumey halo, and murmured, "Be a good boy now and you can have that shot later."

  Tom looked at him with his red-laced eyes. His chapped, cracked lips were wet with spit. "Do you promise?" he whispered back, a conspirator's whisper, breathing out more fumes and running it all together, so it became Deryapromiz?

  "Yes," Johnny said. "I may have been wrong to get you started, but now that I have, I'm going to maintain you. That's all I'll do, though. So have a little dignity, all right?"

  Billingsley looked at him. Wide eyes full of water. Red lids. Lips shining. "I can't," he whispered.

  Johnny sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Billingsley was staring across the stage at Audrey Wyler.

  "Why does she have to wear her damned skirt so short?" he muttered. The smell of his breath was strong enough for Johnny to decide that maybe this wasn't just a case of three drinks and you're out; Old Snoop Doggy Doc had chipped himself an extra two or three somewhere along the line.

  "I don't know," he said, smiling what felt like a big false gameshow host's smile and leading Billingsley back toward the others, getting him turned away from the bar and the drink sitting on top of it. "Are you complaining?"

  "No," Billingsley said. "No, I ... I just ..." He looked nakedly up at Johnny with his wet drunk's eyes. "What was I talking about?"

  "It doesn't matter." A gameshow host's voice was now coming out of the gameshow host's grin: big, hearty, as sincere as a producer's promise to call you next week. "Tell me something--why do they call that hole in the ground China Pit? I've been wondering about that."

  "I imagine Miss Wyler knows more about it than I do," Billingsley said, but Audrey was no longer on the stage; as David and his father joined them, looking concerned, Audrey had exited stage-right, perhaps looking for something else to eat.

  "Oh, come on," Ralph said, unexpectedly conversational. Johnny looked at him and saw that, despite all his own problems, Ralph Carver understood exactly how the land lay with old Tommy. "I bet you've forgotten more local history than that young lady over there ever learned. And it is local history, isn't it?"

  "Well... yes. History and geology."

  "Come on, Tom," Mary said. "Tell us a story. Help pass the time."

  "All right," he said. "But it ain't purty, as we say around here."

  Steve and Cynthia wandered over. Steve had his arm around the girl's waist; she had hers around his, with her fingers curled in one of his belt-loops.

  "Tell it, oldtimer," Cynthia said softly. "Go on."

  So he did.

  2

  "Long before anyone ever thought of mining for copper here, it was gold and silver," Billingsley said. He eased himself down into the wing-chair and shook his head when David offered him a glass of spring-water. "That was long before open-pit mining was thought of, either. In 1858, an outfit called Diablo Mining opened Rattlesnake Number One where the China Pit is now. There was gold, and a good bit of it.

  "It was a shaft-mine-back then they all were--and they kept chasing the vein deeper and deeper, although the company had to know how dangerous it was. The surface up there on the south side of where the pit is now ain't bad--it's limestone, skarn, and a kind of Nevada marble. You find wollastonite in it lots of times. Not valuable, but pretty to look at.

  "Underneath, on the north side of where the pit is now, that's where they sank the Rattlesnake Shaft. The ground over there is bad. Bad for mining, bad for farming, bad for everything. Sour ground is what the Shoshone called it. They had a word for it, a good one, most Shoshone words are good ones, but I disremember it now. All of this is igneous leavings, you know, stuff that was injected into the crust o
f the earth by volcanic eruptions that never quite made it to the surface. There's a word for that kind of leavings, but I disremember that one, too."

  "Porphyry," Audrey called over to him. She was standing on the right side of the stage, holding a bag of pretzels. "Anyone want some of these? They smell a little funny but they taste all right."

  "No, thanks," Mary said. The others shook their heads.

  "Porphyry's the word," Billingsley agreed. "It's full of valuable stuff, everything from garnets to uranium, but a lot of it's unstable. The ground where they sank Rattlesnake Number One had a good vein of gold, but mostly it was homfels--cooked shale. Shale's a sedimentary rock, not strong. You can snap a piece of it in your hands, and when that mine got down seventy feet and the men could hear the walls groaning and squeaking around them, they decided enough was enough. They just walked out. It wasn't a strike for better pay; they just didn't want to die. So what the owners did was hire Chinese. Had them shipped on flatback wagons from Frisco, chained together like convicts. Seventy men and twenty women, all dressed in quilted pajama coats and little round hats. I imagine the owners kicked themselves for not thinking of using them sooner, because they had all sorts of advantages over white men. They didn't get drunk and hooraw through town, they didn't trade liquor to the Shoshone or Paiute, they didn't want whores. They didn't even spit tobacco on the sidewalks. Those were just the bonuses, though. The main thing was they'd go as deep as they were told to go, and never mind the sound of the hornfels squeaking and rubbing in the ground all around them. And the shaft could go deeper faster, because it didn't have to be so big--they were a lot smaller than the white miners, and could be made to work on their knees. Also, any Chinese miner caught with gold-bearing rock on his person could be shot on the spot. And a few were."

  "Christ," Johnny said.

  "Not much like the old John Wayne movies," Billingsley agreed. "Anyway, they were a hundred and fifty feet down--almost twice as deep as when the white miners threw down their picks--when the cave-in happened. There are all kinds of stories about it. One is that they dug up a waisin, a kind of ancient earth-spirit, and it tore the mine down. Another is that they made the tommyknockers mad."

  "What're tommyknockers?" David asked.

  "Troublemakers," Johnny said. "The underground version of gremlins."

  "Three things," Audrey said from her place at stage-right. She was nibbling a pretzel. "First, you call that sort of mine-work a drift, not a shaft. Second, you drive a driftway, you don't sink it. Third, it was a cave-in, pure and simple. No tommyknockers, no earth-spirits."

  "Rationalism speaks," Johnny said. "The spirit of the century. Hurrah!"

  "I wouldn't go ten feet into that kind of ground," Audrey said, "no sane person would, and there they were, a hundred and fifty feet deep, forty miners, a couple of bossmen, at least five ponies, all of them chipping and tromping and yelling, doing everything but setting off dynamite. What's amazing is how long the tommyknockers protected them from their own idiocy!"

  "When the cave-in finally did happen, it happened in what should have been a good place," Billingsley resumed. "The roof fell in about sixty feet from the adit." He glanced at David. "That's what you call the entrance to a mine, son. The miners got up that far from below, and there they were stopped by twenty feet of fallen hornfels, skarn, and Devonian shale. The whistle went off, and the folks from town came up the hill to see what had happened. Even the whores and the gamblers came up. They could hear the Chinamen inside screaming, begging to be dug out before the rest of it came down. Some said they sounded like they were fighting with each other. But no one wanted to go in and start digging. That squealing sound homfels makes when the ground's uneasy was louder than ever, and the roof was bowed down in a couple of places between the adit and the first rockfall."

  "Could those places have been shored up?" Steve asked.

  "Sure, but nobody wanted to take the responsibility for doing it. Two days later, the president and vice president of Diablo Mines showed up with a couple of mining engineers from Reno. They had a picnic lunch outside the adit while they talked over what to do, my dad told me. Ate it spread out on linen while inside that shaft--pardon me, the drift--not ninety feet from where they were, forty human souls were screaming in the dark.

  "There had been cave-ins deeper in, folks said they sounded like something was farting or burping deep down in the earth, but the Chinese were still okay--still alive, anyway--behind the first rockfall, begging to be dug out. They were eating the mine-ponies by then, I imagine, and they'd had no water or light for two days. The mining engineers went in--poked their heads in, anyway--and said it was too dangerous for any sort of rescue operation."

  "So what did they do?" Mary asked.

  Billingsley shrugged. "Set dynamite charges at the front of the mine and brought that down, too. Shut her up."

  "Are you saying they deliberately buried forty people alive?" Cynthia asked.

  "Forty-two counting the line-boss and the foreman," Billingsley said. "The line-boss was white, but a drunk and a man known to speak foul language to decent women. No one spoke up for him. The foreman either, far as that goes."

  "How could they do it?"

  "Most were Chinese, ma'am," Billingsley said, "so it was easy."

  The wind gusted. The building trembled beneath its rough caress like something alive. They could hear the faint sound of the window in the ladies' room banging back and forth. Johnny kept waiting for it to yawn wide enough to knock over Billingsley's bottle booby-trap.

  "But that's not quite the end of the story," Billingsley said. "You know how stuff like this grows in folks' minds over the years." He put his hands together and wiggled the gnarled fingers. On the movie screen a gigantic bird, a legendary death-kite, seemed to soar. "It grows like shadows."

  "Well, what's the end of it?" Johnny asked. Even after all these years he was a sucker for a good story when he heard one, and this one wasn't bad.

  "Three days later, two young Chinese fellows showed up at the Lady Day, a saloon which stood about where The Broken Drum is now. Shot seven men before they were subdued. Killed two. One of the ones they killed was the mining engineer from Reno who recommended that the shaft be brought down."

  "Drift," Audrey said.

  "Quiet," Johnny said, and motioned for Billingsley to go on.

  "One of the 'coolie-boys'--that's what they were called--was killed himself in the fracas. A knife in the back, most likely, although the story most people like is that a professional gambler named Harold Brophy flicked a playing-card from where he was sitting and cut the man's throat with it.

  "The one still alive was shot in five or six places. That didn't stop em from taking him out and hanging him the next day, though, after a little sawhorse trial in front of a kangaroo court. I bet he was a disappointment to them; according to the story, he was too crazy to have any idea what was happening. They had chains on his legs and cuffs on his wrists and still he fought them like a catamount, raving in his own language all the while."

  Billingsley leaned forward a little, seeming to stare at David in particular. The boy looked back at him, eyes wide and fascinated.

  "All of what he said was in the heathen Chinee, but one idea everyone got was that he and his friend had gotten out of the mine and come to take revenge on those who first put them there and then left them there."

  Billingsley shrugged.

  "Most likely they were just two young men from the so-called Chinese Encampment south of Ely, men not quite so passive or resigned as the others. By then the story of the cave-in had travelled, and folks in the Encampment would have known about it. Some probably had relatives in Desperation. And you have to remember that the one who actually survived the shootout didn't have any English other than cuss-words. Most of what they got from him must have come from his gestures. And you know how people love that last twist of the knife in a tall tale. Why, it wasn't a year before folks were saying the Chinese miners were still alive in t
here, that they could hear em talking and laughing and pleading to be let out, moaning and promising revenge."

  "Would it have been possible for a couple of men to have gotten out?" Steve asked.

  "No," Audrey said from the doorway.

  Billingsley glanced her way, then turned his puffy, red-rimmed eyes on Steve. "I reckon," he said. "The two of them might've started back down the shaft together, while the rest clustered behind the rockfall. One of em might have remembered a vent or a chimney--"

  "Bullshit," Audrey said.

  "It ain't," Billingsley said, "and you know it. This is an old volcano-field. There's even extrusive porphyry east of town--looks like black glass with chips of ruby in it: garnets, they are. And wherever there's volcanic rock, there's shafts and chimneys."

  "The chances of two men ever--"

  "It's just a hypothetical case," Mary said soothingly. "A way of passing the time, that's all."

  "Hypothetical bullshit," Audrey grumbled, and ate another dubious pretzel.

  "Anyway, that's the story," Billingsley said, "miners buried alive, two get out, both insane by then, and they try to take their revenge. Later on, ghosts in the ground. If that ain't a tale for a stormy night, I don't know what is." He looked across at Audrey, and on his face was a sly drunk's smile. "You been diggin up there, miss. You new folks. Haven't come across any short bones, have you?"

  "You're drunk, Mr. Billingsley," she said coldly.

  "No," he said. "I wish I was, but I ain't. Excuse me, ladies and gents. I get yarning and I get the whizzies. It never damn fails."

  He crossed the stage, head down, shoulders slumped, weaving slightly. The shadow which followed him was ironic both in its size and its heroic aspect. His bootheels clumped. They watched him go.

  There was a sudden flat smacking sound that made them all jump. Cynthia smiled guiltily and raised her sneaker. "Sorry," she said. "A spider. I think it was one of those fiddleheads."

  "Fiddlebacks," Steve said.

  Johnny bent down to look, hands planted on his legs just above the knees. "Nope."

  "Nope, what?" Steve asked. "Not a fiddleback?"