An Eye for Gold Read online

  “Of course.”

  “I see your pal, I’ll tell him you been looking for him.”

  “Thanks, Sam.” Kyle put one foot resolutely in front of the other, moving himself through the doorway.

  “Watch your passage on that road, boy; it ain’t getting any younger.”

  “Right,” Kyle called over his shoulder.

  The old man came to the door and raised his voice to be heard. “And watch you don’t drive out east of the range herd. There’s a fire burning, you know.”

  “Yes. Good-bye.”

  Sam began whistling again.

  Kyle stumbled to his vehicle as if he had wakened from a deep sleep. His senses were numbed. He no longer felt any sense of where MacCallum was and didn’t care. Perhaps this time the little shit had gotten himself bitten by a rattlesnake, or had fallen down an abandoned mine shaft, or worse yet had finally done as he had so many times threatened, and had simply folded his hand and left the damned sorry poker game they called a career. The man was mad. A nuclear warhead could be bearing down on him like a meteor and MacCallum would laugh with delight at the oddity of the experience.

  Kyle Christie fired the ignition of his rented Explorer and slammed its automatic shift into gear with a fury he usually reserved for something truly important, like stomping out flaming hundred-dollar bills. MacCallum was gone and had not said good-bye or when he’d be back, and that was Kyle’s tough shit. It was his own damned fault for letting MacCallum do so much of the preliminary work. He hadn’t even seen his working maps, had no idea what he’d found. There was going to be no new project, so why not just drive back into Lovelock and belly up to an electronic poker machine and get himself drunk? After all, he was more likely to get rich playing a game he knew was set against him than banging his head against the quest for gold. MacCallum had taught him that himself.

  As he jounced back down the canyon road, the bitterness of Kyle’s thoughts ricochetted like a pin ball from MacCallum’s extraordinary luck to the paltriness of his own existence to the decay of Sam. Couldn’t leave his gold, what a putz. The old fart is just like every other delusionary old sourdough who ever put pick to rock.

  Kyle slammed on his brakes, suddenly putting together a new picture: MacCallum always stopped to see Sam. And Sam thought he had gold.

  He slapped the steering wheel with a mixture of frustration and amazement. Here he’d always found something else to be doing while MacCallum piddled around the hills with Sam, and all the time, the old man had been showing MacCallum where the gold was. Maybe that was how the son of a bitch did it!

  15

  “SHIT, THAT’S HUGE,” I GASPED, AS WE CAME ALONG Interstate 80 around the shoulder of the mountains northeast of Lovelock and the southern edge of the range fire came into view. “It’s got to be five miles across.”

  “Looks like it’s spread since we flew past it this morning,” said Tom.

  “I’ll say.”

  “The wind’s come up.”

  Ian stabbed a finger at the recirculation button on the air conditioning. As subtly as possible, he palmed an arbuterol atomizer out of his pocket, squirted some into his mouth, and inhaled.

  I glanced at him, wondering if it was allergies that had brought him to Nevada. Or had it been a libertarian bent? And I wondered at the depth of my own presumptions. I rubbed at my eyes in sudden fatigue. It was barely past noon, but the day was already on a downhill glide.

  “My pilot said there were more fires this year than usual,” Tom commented to Ian. “What do your sources say?”

  Ian stuck out his chest and replied, “There are the usual causative factors—you know, like sloppy campers and lightning strikes—but there have been more storms than usual, and the range specialist at BLM told me it’s also a change in the fuel.”

  “How so?” asked Tom.

  “As I said earlier,” Ian replied, giving me a haughty look, “There’s a species out there called cheat grass, an exotic that came in with domesticated herd animals. It’s taken over from the native species in a lot of areas because it sprouts earlier and takes up all the moisture, crowding the natives out. Then it dies off, dries out, and . . . then the spark hits.” He glanced out at the smoke and made an ineffectual attempt to clear his sinuses. It began to occur to me that Ian was trying very hard to make a positive impression on Tom, and that I was in his way. Instead of working with Tom as a daring duo, he was repeatedly being relegated to the status of walking encyclopedia and chauffeur, while Tom focused his attentions on me.

  I stared morosely out across the burning desert. The grass may have started the blaze going, but now it had engulfed the sage brush, and, once ignited, its resinous wood and leaves burned hot as blazes. Little balls of fire leapt hungrily from bush to bush, spalling off a greasy smudge of soot that would blacken the soil itself.

  This view of destruction brought back the image of the woman I had just met. I shuddered at the thought of what might have scarred her. Whole patches of her face were ropy with skin grafts, her throat looked like it had been clawed by a bear, and her eyes were so sunken with blindness that J wondered if they were indeed still there. She was missing fingers, too, but I was used to such matters from growing up on a ranch: It’s not infrequently that someone loses digits to a combine or some such mechanical necessity, and one does not treat the victims of such incidents as grotesque, because one might be next.

  Nevertheless, I had found our meeting with Shirley Code distressing. She was a tough old girl, but something had her sufficiently scared that she’d put on an act to get rid of us. And she had known Patricia Gilmore, who had been under investigation with the FBI and was now dead. “If we can’t get to the crash site, can we at least see Pat Gilmore’s office?” I asked.

  Tom Latimer had slumped down again in the backseat, folded his arms, and closed his eyes. “No, her office is at the mine, which as the good deputy has pointed out, is on the other side of that fire. Ian will just take us on up to Winnemucca, and I can come back and hit this job another day.”

  THE TRIP BACK to Salt Lake City was uneventful. I sat up front with Faye, pretending interest in learning to fly a twin, but mostly staring into the distance while I sorted through my thoughts. Tom Latimer was messing with me, and I couldn’t figure out why. He had lured me out to Nevada by saying he needed my help. Now he was acting as if his interest in my assistance had ended. That had to be so much manure.

  The fact that he was now once again stretched out in the backseat of the plane with his eyes closed was an attempt to try to lure me even further, of that I felt certain. And yes, I was curious, to know what this was all about, but no, I was not foolish. I had enjoyed the day’s game of shooting my mouth off about whether Patricia Gilmore had died by accident or by malice, but I did not feel the least bit tempted to carry a dead person’s banner into battle solely for the sake of some overheated sense of right and wrong. What was right was to live long and prosper, maybe even have a home that I owned, and . . . perhaps a husband to live in it with me. Besides, I had not even known the lady.

  And into what, precisely, was Tom trying to lure me? Surely the Federal Bureau of Investigation wasn’t hard up for field operatives, and if they wanted a fourth or fifth forensic geologist to add to their ranks, they could have their pick of fresh recruits straight out of Ph.D. candidacy. The job market was that tight. Why pick ol’ Em Hansen, possessor of only a paltry B.A.?

  I was damned if I was going to ask Tom any of these questions. That was probably what he was hoping for, and besides, I was not going to go to work as a detective, let alone an FBI agent, so why continue the conversation?

  When we got back to Salt Lake City, Tom prepared to load me into his car and take me “home” to Ava’s, but I balked. It was only three in the afternoon, and I had told Ava I’d be gone through dinner. Instead, I asked Faye Carter where she was off to.

  She shrugged. “No plans. I’m going to put the plane in its hangar and write up my log book, then I thought I’d
head home and watch cartoons on TV. Got a better idea?”

  “Is home anywhere near the University?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  I screwed my face around, crimping a cheek and rolling my eyes to indicate surreptitiously that I wanted to shuck Tom. “Oh, nothing. Just thought I’d hit the library up there.”

  Faye nodded. “Grot ya covered.”

  I turned to Tom. “Well, thanks for a pleasant outing. I’m sure Ava would love it if you dropped in, even without me for an excuse, but don’t ask for coffee.”

  Tom’s eyelids lowered a fraction of an inch. “Ha, ha.” He stared at me for a while, frustration clouding his face. “You have a lot of talent, Em, but you’re right, it’s not my business to try to guide you.”

  My mouth sagged open with surprise and embarrassment. I said, “Well, I’ll let you know if I find out anything that might help your investigation.”

  “Sure,” he said, and headed for his car.

  FAYE DROVE A late model Porsche. “Nice wheels,” I said, as we bolted into the fast lane and accelerated toward the city.

  “Thanks,” she answered offhandedly.

  Used to money, I decided. In fact, oblivious. “I thought all pilots were broke until they made captain for United Airlines.”

  She shot me a look of appraisal, then fixed her eyes back on the road as she passed a slower vehicle on the right and then wiggled back into the fast lane. “And?”

  I decided on the nakedness approach. “I hope that wasn’t rude, but, well . . . I’m a geologist, and I’m out of work for the umpteenth time, so naturally I’m looking around to see what else I could do for a living. I love flying, but everyone always tells me it pays less than half what I was making, and that I’d have to cough up untold thousands of dollars just to go from private pilot to commercial-and instrument-rated, let alone get the hours necessary to be hired by a commercial firm. But I look at the evidence before me here, and I get to wondering; here is a woman about my age who flies for a living, wears custom tailored uniforms, and drives a car that costs as much as most peoples’ houses. Supposition A—pilots starve—does not match with effect B—you look well-fed. So, using just the teensiest shred of deduction, I wonder if there might be a few angles I have not considered.”

  Faye blinked. “I’m a trust fund baby,” she said succinctly.

  “Dang.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  I chuckled, not unkindly.

  “I know it’s ludicrous to ask for sympathy,” Faye said, her lips curling with rueful humor, “but I’m serious. Look at it this way: You may hear the wolf scratching at the door, but sometimes the wolf is your friend.”

  “Sure. Uh-huh. Absolutely. You’re nuts.”

  “You think so? Listen, you have to work to pay the rent and feed yourself, right?”

  “Sooo right.”

  “Well, I don’t. Every month, a check comes from my stock broker whether I get out of bed or not. So why get out of bed? Why not just stay there?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said heartily.

  Faye downshifted and matter-of-factly left a Toyota in the dust. “No, really. Money is just money. It doesn’t keep you warm. It doesn’t feed you. I can buy warmth and food—and that’s important, I agree—but keeping the creature alive is not everything. What’s most important to understand is that money doesn’t make you happy. In fact, it can do just the opposite.”

  “Sure, sure. You look absolutely miserable.”

  Faye lifted one shoulder and dropped it. “Not miserable, just bored.” As she spoke, she lifted her right hand off the steering wheel and flung it open in emphasis.

  I stared at Faye’s open palm. It was smooth and unmarked, and . . . poignantly empty. I opened my own. It was dry and chapped, and crisscrossed by scars and calluses. Clearly she enjoyed her Porsche, and her flying, and her nice clothes, but as clearly, she longed for something immaterial and beyond her grasp.

  As if reading my thoughts, she said: “The Dalai Lama says in The Art of Happiness that there’s a difference between happiness and pleasure. A Porsche can bring pleasure, but only fleeting happiness. True happiness comes from training the mind.”

  “Well, sure; I’d like to be as enlightened as the Dalai Lama, too, but let’s stick with simple stuff. like flying and not having to get out of bed.”

  ‘It is simple: I couldn’t learn to meditate, so I had to keep busy.”

  “Okay . . .”

  Faye slapped the gearshift rather more forcibly than was necessary to make her next downshift “You’re right, I’m getting ahead of myself. The thing is, my mind is entirely too highly trained in a different way. It is highly educated, in a Western sense. I’ve been to the best schools. I’ve skied the best mountains on three continents and New Zealand. I’ve sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii, scubaed the biggest reefs, biked to the continental divide, and even tried bungee jumping, God help me. When I’m not being a hopeless jock, I’ve numbered pot sherds on digs in the Yucatan, volunteered in AIDS clinics in Africa, and taught English as a second language to Indochinese immigrants. I’ve—”

  “And you’re bored?”

  She sighed in exasperation. “I did all these things because I was bored. I call it ‘High Experience Syndrome.’ I’ve always been able to do anything I want And I’m so used to doing that I don’t know how to be.”

  I stared at her in frank amazement. She had just characterized herself down to die last micron, and had done so without a lick of self-pity, only frustration. Looking away, I made an inventory of each joint of each of my fingers, trying to decide what, if anything, to say in reply.

  Faye snapped me out of this reverie by rapping me on the shoulder with the back of her hand. “Hey, don’t get too excited, you know? Like the wise men say: ‘To do is to be,’ Descartes; ‘To be is to do,’ Sartre; ‘Do-be-do-be-do,’ Sinatra.’ ”

  16

  AT THE LIBRARY, I FOUND MY WAY TO THE SCIENCE section, dug out a few texts, pulled up a carrel, and began to turn pages. I wanted to unwind and let the events of the day, and of the week, and in fact of the past year kind of trickle down through my subconscious and settle as best they could. I needed to figure put what to do about Tom, and what to do with Ray. I needed to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I needed to act like an adult for a change, and force from my mind all thoughts of chasing around Nevada after the riddles of dead biologists and endangered rodents and missing gold geologists, and instead identify a path to follow into a career that would interest me, yes, but also provide a platform from which I might hope to build a more stable life.

  So what did I read? Why, a book on the Ice Age, of course, to see if Umberto Rodriguez had had all his facts straight. Actually, as is my habit, I didn’t read much of the text of the book, I only perused the illustrations. I am a slow reader, and I pick up information much more quickly from the pictures than from the text. And indeed, it seemed that the vast desert I had flown over that day had not been desert for very long. Less than fourteen thousand years, in fact. Just a blink of an eye, geologically speaking. The book showed pictures of woolly mammoths treadding the shores of wide lakes where dry desert basins now glared white under the searing desert sun. Extinct camels strolled those shores, and giant ground sloths, vanished horse species, dire wolves, and cheetahs.

  I turned next to a book on the geologic history of the area. I flipped backward through the section on the Great Basin, so called because it does not drain its surface waters to the sea. I looked at the map. The towering rampart of the Sierra Nevada blocked drainage to the west, and neither was there drainage to the north, the east, or the south. It is in the nature of nature that water responds to the draw of gravity, and flows downhill toward the sea. In any other spot in North America, each drop of rain stands a chance to flow in an orderly fashion downhill following the call of gravity, until, by joining with other drops into rivulets and with other rivulets into streams and thence into rivers, they fin
d the sea. On their way, the drops of rain may tarry awhile as ice, expanding in cracks between boulders, heaving them apart and levering them downhill. The drops thus tumble the massive boulders and pluck up grains of sand and buoy up delicate platelets of clay, prying relentlessly at the surface of the earth until great valleys are formed, valleys which in turn guide the waters to the sea, where the cycle of evaporation, rain, and down-cutting begins again.

  But here, in the back of beyond, in the forgotten desert of the Great Basin, no drops find the ocean. To a geologist’s eye, such aberrations of nature proclaim the youth of the terrain. Nevada has too recently heaved upward to have developed an orderly system of runoff. And it is still rising, its disorderly rumpus of movement routing all waters to its arid center.

  And why was Nevada rising? That morning, I had told Faye the most popular theory, but there on the page were two more. The page began to swim. I was getting tired. It had been a long day.

  I looked at the nearest clock. It was barely four; it would be an hour and a half before my truck might be ready at the mechanic’s, and even if I got it, I didn’t know what I was going to do to fill my evening. I didn’t want to see Ray. I speculated that he’d still be annoyed at me over my faux pas with his nephew Teddy. Teddy, the child whose actions had rubbed in the fact that I knew nothing of children.

  Did I want any children of my own? When I dug down into my soul, I found not a twinge of interest, but neither did I find disinterest.

  I sighed heavily. Not for the first time, I wondered if I was not, in fact, some other species than human, just stuck in a human body as some cosmic joke. Perhaps I am a martian, I told myself. That would explain why I’m unsure about having children, and feel so out of sync with the human race.

  My mind turned to thoughts of Ray. Handsome Ray of the indigo blue eyes, athletic Ray who spoke with his body instead of words. It would certainly feel good to give him a daughter or a son. He knew all about children, and clearly longed for one . . . or perhaps ten. I shuddered. Of this much I was certain: I was not interested in bearing ten children. Two, max. If indeed my body could produce even one. In all my years of horsing around with sex, I’d never even had so much as a scare of pregnancy, so either I was damned good at prevention or sterile. Or, as I feared, martian.