Stephen King – Desperation

Billingsley looked at him. Wide eyes full of water. Red lids. Lips shining. “1 can’t,” he whispered.

Johnny sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, When he opened them again, Billingsley was staring across the stage atAudrey Wy ]er.

“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 some-thing 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.

“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 ofNevada 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 of 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 Rattle-snake Number One had a good vein of gold, but mostly it was hornfels-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 earthspirits.”

“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 tommy- knockers 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 hornfels 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 fromReno . They had a picnic lunch outside the adit while they talked over what to do, my dad told me. Ate it spread Out Ofl 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, a way 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.”