An Eye for Gold Page 11

  By God, this man is smooth, Shirley thought venomously. She said, “I won’t be calling.”

  “Okay,” Tom answered calmly.

  Okay? Just okay? I’m off the hook? Bullshit!

  “Well, I guess we’ll be going,” Tom said. “Sorry to trouble you.”

  Shirley heard the door open. But before Tom Latimer could exit, Shirley caught him by the arm, and hissed, “Don’t mess with that young lady, mister.”

  Tom took Shirley’s gnarled hand in both of his, enveloping it in cool, dry flesh. After a moment, he spoke very softly, so that only she could hear him. “I understand what you’re saying. And I wish I could say, ‘Don’t worry.’ But the thing is, she’s on a path where she could get locked into things that don’t suit her, or worse yet, hurt badly. You understand that, don’t you? She’s too headstrong to protect, so I’m doing the next best thing.”

  “Which is what?” Shirley demanded, thinking: You arrogant son of a bitch.

  The man named Tom hesitated a while, thinking over his reply. “Sometimes,” he said, almost sighing, “if you want to help a flower unfold as it should, you’ve got to give it a little tug.”

  The hands released Shirley’s. She heard the door open, and the soft sounds of the man’s slightly less confident footfalls following the others out to the car. She wished she could see him. She wanted to know, from the way he held his head and shoulders, if he really, truly, cared.

  14

  KYLE CHRISTIE’S GREEN EXPLORER BOUNCED AND wallowed as he maneuvered it up the washed-out dirt track that led up to the ghost town where Sam the squatter lived. The place depressed him. There was little left of Rosebud, just a few tumbled-down shacks and a peppering of adits. It irritated him that MacCallum seemed to see it differentiy, almost as the fresh, new boom town it had been in 1906. “Just look at this place, Kyle,” MacCallum had said to him, the first time they had come up here together. ‘The remains of a hopeful community of miners, merchants, and real estate developers. They graded streets and erected a hotel, a bank, a post office, and even a fledgling newspaper, The Rosebud Mining News. That’s enthusiasm. That’s great. Above the town site, we have Rosebud Peak topping out at 8,514 feet above sea level, the tallest summit in the Kamma Mountains, and down in the canyon below, we have the ghosts of the rival town of Goldbud.”

  Goldbud, Rosebud, Kyle now thought as the Explorer lurched sickeningly over a particularly deep washout in the dirt track he was following. Should have named it Nipped-in-the-Bud. He glanced left and right, searching for any signs of MacCallum in the vacant expanse of rabbit brush and sage that occupied the hillside. He liked remote places just fine, had in fact been drawn into geology in part for the hope of spending lots of his time outdoors, but he didn’t share MacCallum’s romance for the old West. In fact, nowadays he liked it only as an antidote to the bad feeling he tended to get in the singles bars in which he kept finding himself.

  “What drew the miners, bankers, real estate developers, and journalists here, of all places?” MacCallum had asked him, his face a picture of amusement and delight “How did they fare in this hopeless isolation? Think of it, Kyle; on this day, we have arrived within two hours’ drive from a superhighway, but in 1906, the best access was fifty miles by stagecoach over this dirt road from a stop on the railroad down by the Humboldt River. No farm-bred man could have felt at home here; the soil is rough with grit and starved for organic material, and the only water comes from a few meager springs down the road.”

  “This town had only one crop,” Kyle had said moodily.

  “Yes. Gold, or the rumor of it Think of it, Kyle: In 1907, at the height of the local boom, the combined habitation of the two “Buds” was something over five thousand inhabitants. By 1908, when the cycle of fraud and folly had run its course, most miners had grabbed their picks and single jack drills and had hopped the stage en route to the next great hope.”

  “So why are we here?” Kyle had asked, feeling as hopeless as those miners.

  MacCallum had said, “Ah, Kyle, you have to look, man! This place isn’t dead, it’s only sleeping. Look, there’s what’s left of the Brown Palace Mine. A man named Leach drifted one thousand six hundred feet of workings under the Golden Jupiter and Ragged Six claims; there, and there. Over there, a man named Quirk worked a claim or two. You got to read the histories to bend time the other way and look into the future.”

  “They didn’t find much,” Kyle had observed.

  “No, not much,” MacCallum had agreed, smiling like a boy on Christmas morning. “But the transit of hope can be traced long after the bones of the hopeful have turned to dust.”

  Kyle had been so mystified by that remark that he had almost said nothing, but finally asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  MacCallum had answered, “I can still see every spot some poor sod sank a shovel in this whole valley. I believe I’ll get to work.”

  All Kyle could see now, as he bounced back up the road alone, were the tracks where the occasional four-wheeler had scrubbed away the few stray desert plants that had tried to gain a foothold on the beaten earth. The squatter’s monthly run to town in his dilapidated van could alone have caused this much disruption, but he knew that most of the tracks were probably MacCallum’s. Kyle stared gloomily at the emptiness that had been Rosebud. Was there more gold here? MacCallum had not said. He had come and gone from the Kamma Mountains for several months, spending two or three weeks in the field and then going home for as long, his typical pattern when he was generating a prospect. Kyle had kept up with him the first week, making sounds like he understood what interested MacCallum in the played-out district, but had gone home with a case of the flu and had not quite gotten around to coming back until MacCallum’s last cycle. This time, they had been in Nevada two weeks, and Kyle had walked with MacCallum for the first few hours and then thought of something he needed to do back at the office. The fact was that there was really nothing for him to do until the drilling started except keep MacCallum from wandering off somewhere, and now he had failed at even that.

  On the face of it, Kyle knew prospecting as well as MacCallum did: You find something that looks interesting, whack a chunk loose, and send it in for assay. If the assay looks good, you drill. If the drill samples have what you want, you dig. Any fool could do it, and many had. Even in the old days, before the rise of corporate entities with big drilling budgets, the old coots had worked their ways up the creeks, knocking a bit of sand into their gold pans and washing it in a circular swing with a little bit of water. If there was gold in the sand, it quickly lagged into a concentrate, due to its greater density. Following shows of gold up the ravine led to the vein. And if the area didn’t “pan out,” the prospector moved on. But that was the hit-or-miss school of prospecting. To hit like MacCallum could, you had to know a bit of magic.

  “What are you looking for here?” the old squatter had asked MacCallum on one of those first days they had worked this district. He had come out in front of his shack to say hello.

  MacCallum’s laughter had bubbled like soap. “Gold, Sam. Gold!”

  Kyle had asked MacCallum perhaps a dozen times over the years to explain how he looked for gold, and had never gotten an answer he found any more useful than that one, but Sam had reframed the question more simply. “But what exactly do you do, Son? Just whack at everything that looks like quartz?”

  MacCallum had taken Sam’s question quite seriously, and had pondered for a long while. Then he’d said, “Well, of course; most gold deposits are associated with some degree of silicification.” He had scratched at his jaw. “So yes, just looking for silicification and finding it has some significance. But there are numerous types of silicification, aren’t there? Like the white, bull quartz of the California Mother Lode district . . . banded chalcedonic vein quartz . . . pervasive silica with no association to normal veins . . . opaline quartz of the hot spring ilk. And there are textures within the quartz, and generations of fracturing or veining. I look a
t the shape of the fragments if it’s a silicified breccia, and at the type of breccia, and its origin.”

  “But why quartz?” the old man had asked. “You’re not mining quartz, are you?”

  “Well, gold is a hydrothermal deposit, at least originally, but the clay alteration that’s associated with hydrothermal deposits is soft.” He pointed at a low spot in the nearest hill. “So that saddle there might represent a fault with hydrothermal alteration. Gold. Lead. Something might be there. A selenium halo around gold. The clay envelope is soft, so it erodes, and the minerals associated with it can easily be removed by weathering. There could be a placer deposit below it, if it feeds a stream; or maybe not. So you might be wise to go and look there, but the clay zone will probably produce no outcrop, or if it does, that outcrop might not have die gold or other elements there at the surface anymore, so you’re back to looking for those silicified rocks, because the silica might have come up along structure, and that structure might be the feeder to the mineralization. Or it might be right next to the mineral-bearing vein, like a guide. The quartz is hard—it resists erosion—-so you look for a bump. Sometimes they’re very large—knobs, ridges—but sometimes they are the size of a filing cabinet or a foot stool, and the bigger one is not necessarily the better, or it might be totally gone, but there is a little float trall or big old boulders out there at the range front. There is no end of ways to interpret it all. But I try not to get caught up in making interpretations. Interpretations make me narrow my focus.”

  Kyle knew all this, but then again, he didn’t. And he couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without a focus, even if it was only the need to pee.

  Sam had smiled knowingly and asked, “So what do you do really?”

  MacCallum had leaned back and laughed into the sky. “I just try to keep my eyes open, Sam. That’s all.”

  Kyle had shaken his head. “But that’s not all you do, now is it, Don? You find stuff that no one else even knows to look for. I keep thinking there must be little gnomes out here holding up signs for you. And they hide when they see me coming.”

  MacCallum had patted him on the shoulder and said, “Kyle, old friend, most of the time, there really isn’t anything there.” And then that laugh had erupted again. And then he had wandered off to drink bad coffee with the old squatter, leaving Kyle to wonder why he hadn’t gone into used car sales.

  Kyle could somehow still feel that pat on his shoulder like it was a big cosmic nudge. Asking himself why he was even looking for MacCallum, he parked his vehicle next to the old brush-painted van which stood near the one shack in Rosebud that still had a full roof on it. The shack in fact had quite an excellent roof, thanks to the squatter, and all four walls were tight against the winds. It had the burned look all wooden structures acquire in the desert after a few cycles under the blazing summer sun and the icy breaths of winter. Pink fiberglass which the squatter had used for chinking hung about like stray whiskers between the aged logs that formed the structure’s walls, and the overflow from a caulking gun gummed the edges of the panes of the small windows. The only other obvious touch of modernity was the battered propane tank that rested against the side nearest the portion of the shack which the squatter called the kitchen. As Kyle neared the door, the squatter’s flea-ravaged hound staggered up and sniffed at his pant leg.

  “Sam?” Kyle called out. “You there?”

  An odd descant of whistling that had been drifting from the shack stopped abruptly and was replaced by the squatter’s sonorous voice. “I was just puttin’ some coffee on, come to think of it. Be glad for the company.”

  “Oh, I don’t need any coffee, Sam, thanks anyway,” Kyle replied, hoping against hope he could get away quickly. “I was just looking for MacCallum. Wondered if you’d seen him.”

  “No, no, no, you don’t have to be polite and formal here, my boy. You just come on in and have a cup of Sam’s coffee, now.”

  Kyle squeezed his eyes shut in frustration. Acceptance of this invitation meant an hour lost at least, the man rambled so. “I just dropped by looking for The Don, really,” he insisted, and repeated his inquiry. “I was wondering if you’d seen him.”

  “Coffee’s good for the soul, son. You got to feed your soul, remember. You come on in. It won’t take me but a moment to boil this pot.” The old man scuffled as he started dragging his six-gallon Jerry can of water toward the edge of the shelf.

  Kyle sighed in defeat, once again manipulated, once again pushed into doing something he swore he wouldn’t do. “Here, let me help you,” he said disconsolately, as he pulled open the screen door and let himself into the tight confines of the shack. Kyle hated being inside of it. Its ancient timbers sagged too close to his head. “When are you going to get yourself one of those jobs with a spigot, Sam?” He hoisted the jug to the counter.

  “I’d still have to lift it up here now, wouldn’t I?” the old man said cheerfully. “Besides, this one works fine. Waste not, want not. There now, you set yourself down,” he added, pushing a stack of Reader’s Digest magazines away from the less cluttered end of the table. The movement set off a small avalanche of much-thumbed post cards, which slewed into a dish of kibbles he had set out for the several geriatric cats that roamed the room at intervals. One of them stared at Kyle from a narrow, fur-encrusted couch with ruptured upholstery. The animal yawned, managing to pull its kitty lips back so far that they almost met in the back. After considering Kyle abstractedly for a moment, it apparently decided he was no threat, and set to licking its matted fur with a raspy pink tongue.

  Sam grunted with the effort of trying to tip the jug. He could not budge it.

  He’s gone downhill since the last time I stopped by, Kyle decided, and said, “Sam, this just isn’t going to work anymore. Why the hell don’t you just move to town?”

  Sam turned and smiled at Kyle. “And leave my gold? Never.” He turned back to his task, and to grunting.

  Gold? You have fantasies of gold, old man? Kyle set about rigging a siphon through which Sam could drain the five-gallon jugs without tipping them. He checked the water levels in each. One was still full, but the rest, including the one the man had been struggling with, held only a gallon each. The last time Kyle had visited, he recalled, Sam had easily lifted it. Kyle moved the siphon into the full jug and poured half of each remaining gallon into a large pot which had a lid. Then he hung a ladle off one handle of the pot. “There. That’s two gallons right here in this pot for you, Sam. You can just ladle it out a cup at a time.” When Sam did not reply, Kyle shook his head and sat down on the bench that bordered the table.

  Sam said, “You’re a smart one, Kyle. You really undersell yourself.” When Kyle didn’t answer, he busied himself about the propane burner that held the pan of water, then pulled the sodden paper-towel filter out of his coffee maker, laboriously dumped out a portion of the grounds, and added a tablespoonful from a can of what passed for fresh. He was short, and his bent spine threw his disease-bulged stomach low over stumpy legs and broad hips. As he moved from place to place, the stiffness and forward angle of his torso suggested that he was on a collision course with Mother Earth. Grimy woolen britches hung in sagging festoons from his suspenders, and he wore a faded red union suit, even though the outside temperature was hitting ninety. His hair, which stood out in wisps, was a ghostly white, in stark contrast to his face, which was sunburned to a ruddy mahogany, and the wild growth of white stubble on his cheeks suggested that he was almost due for his monthly clean-up and run into Lovelock for supplies.

  “Make mine nice and hot, Sam,” Kyle said wanly, hoping that heat might kill a few of the microbes that Sam was now ignorantly applying to his coffee mug with the thumb he was using to wipe it “clean.”

  “Yep, yep, always nice and hot at Sam’s,” the old man replied. “Say, I got a few new cards from my daughter since the last time you been out here.” He reached up onto a shelf for a shoe box.

  Kyle hung his head. Post cards meant an extra half hour. Th
ere was no looking at just the new ones. That shoe box had a way of belching forth miscellaneous memories like a cornucopia from hell. Kyle sipped gingerly at the coffee Sam had set before him, and made polite sounds as needed. His mind turned to purée under the enchantment of the old man’s sonorous voice. He tracked the course of the sun as the angles of its shadows shifted across the table top, and he occasionally glanced at his watch. The hour passed glacially, and the minutes played little games by stretching out as long and thin as rubber and then shattering into tatters. Finally, when Sam ran out of post cards and began whistling to himself once again, Kyle repeated his question. “So, you seen Don lately?”

  “MacCallum?”

  “That’s the one, Sam.”

  “Oh, he drops in when he’s about; you know him.”

  “Yeah. What I was wondering is, have you seen him today?”

  The old man tipped his head back as if trying to remember something as frail as today when there were so many yesterdays. “Nope.”

  Kyle’s heart sank. The old codger would probably forget that Kyle had been here as soon as his vehicle was out of sight down the canyon. “See him yesterday?”

  “Nope.”

  Kyle knew that MacCallum had in fact been here the morning before. He had mentioned it when he had arrived at the mine to answer Virgil Davis’s summons.

  Exhausted by the waste of an hour, he stood up and lurched toward the door. “Gotta go,” he said dully.

  “Don’t feel you got to hurry on my account.”

  “See you, Sam.”

  Sam shook his head kindly. “You got to stop and smell the roses, son. Before you know it, you’re gonna be as old and shot to hell as I am.”

  Kyle pulled the door halfway open.

  Sam stared out the fly-spattered window over the propane stove, his eyes bright and a smile on his lips. “Life is what you make of it, my boy.”