“What is this?” Turner asks him. “Any idea?”
Of course he does; it’s Rattlesnake Number One, the old China Shaft. He opens his mouth to say so,
then closes it again. This is not a matter for a blast-monkey like Kirk Turner, and is certainly not one for his crew, nitro-boys who spend their weekends in Ely gambling, whoring, drinking … and talking, of course. Talking about any thing and everything. Nor can he take them inside. He thinks they would go, that their curiosity would drive them in spite of the obvious risks involved (a drift-mine this old, running through earth this uneasy, shit, a loud yell might be enough to bring the roof down), but the talk would get back to the prancing little MSHA faggot in no time flat, and when it did, losing his job would be the least of Ripton ‘s worries. The MSHA fag (all hat and no cattle is how Frank Geller, the chief mining engineer, sums him up) likes Ripton no more than Ripton likes him, and the foreman who leads an expedition into the long-buried China Shaft today might find himself in federal court facing a fifty-thousand-dollar fine and a possible five years in jail, the week after next. There are at least nine red-letter regulations expressly forbidding entry into “unsafe and unimproved structures.” Which this of course is.
Yet those bones and old dreams call to him like troubled voices from his childhood, like the ghost of every unfulfilled ambition he has ever held, and he knows even z then that he isn’t going to turn the China Shaft meekly over to the company and the federal pricks without at least one look inside for himself He instructs Turner, who is bitterly disappointed but not really argumentative (he understands about MSHA as well as Ripton… maybe, as a blast-monkey, even better), to have yellow RESTRICTED AREA tapes placed across the opening. He then turns to the rest of the crew and reminds them that the newly uncovered drift, which might turn out to be a historical and archaeological treasure trove, is on DMC
property. “I don’t expect you to keep this quiet for-ever,” he tells them, “but as a favor to me I’d like you to keep your mouths shut for the next Jew days. Even with your wives. Let me notify the brass. That part should be easy, at least-Symes, the comptroller, is coming in fromPhoenix next week. Will you do that for me?”
They say they will. Not all will be able to keep their promise even for twenty-four hours, of course-some men are just no good at keeping secrets-but he thinks he commands enough respect among them to buy twelve hours and four would probably be enough. Four hours after quitting time. Four hours in there by himself with a flash-light, a camera, and an electric follow-me for any souvenirs he may decide to collect.
Four hours with all those childhood fantasies he is too old a hand to think about. And if the roof should pick that moment, after almost a hundred and forty years and untold blasts shaking the ground all around it, to let go? Let it. He’s a man with no wife, no kids, no parents, and two brothers who have forgotten he’s alive. He has a sneaking suspicion that he wouldn‘t be losing that many years, in any case. He’s been feeling punk for almost six months now, and just lately he had taken to pissing blood.
Not a lot, but even a little seems like a lot when it’s yours you see in the toilet bowl.
If I get out of this, maybe I’ll go to the doctor, he thinks. Take it as a sign and go to the damned doctor.
How about that?
Turner wants to take some pictures of the exposed drift after he clocks out. Ripton lets him. It seems the quickest way to get rid of him.
“How far in do you think we punched it?” Turner asks, standing about two feet beyond the yellow tape and snap-ping pictures with his Nikon-pictures that, with no flash, will show nothing but a black hole and a few scattered bones that might belong to a deer.
“No way to tell,” Ripton says. In his mind he’s invento-rying the equipment he’ll take in with him.
“You ain’t gonna do nothin dumb after I’m gone, are you?” Turner asks.
“Nope,” Ripton says. “I have too much damned respect for Mining Safety to even think of such a thing.”
“Yeah, right,” Turner says, laughing, and early the next morning, aroundtwo o’clock , a much larger version of Gary Ripton will enter the bedroom Turner shares with his wife and shoot the man as he sleeps. His wife, too. Tak!
It’s a busy night for Gary Ripton. A night of killing (not one of Turner’s blast-crew lives to see the morning sun) and a night of placing can tahs; he has taken a gunnysack filled with them when he leaves the pit, over a hundred in all. Some have broken into pieces, but he knows even the fragments retain some of their queer, unpredictable power. He spends most of the night placing these relics, leaving them in odd corners, mailboxes, glove compartments. Even in pants pockets! Yes! Hardly anyone locks their houses out here, hardly anyone stays up late out here, and the homes belonging to Turner’s blastcrew are not the only ones Gary Ripton visits.
He returns to the pit, feeling as trashed-out as Santa Claus returning to the North Pole after the big night… only Santa ‘s work ends once the presents have been distributed.
Ripton ‘s is only beginning. it’squarter to five ; he has over two hours before the first members of Pascal Martinez ‘s small Saturday day-crew show up. It should be enough, but there is certainly no time to waste.Gary Ripton ‘s body is bleeding so badly he’s had to stuff his underwear full of toilet paper to absorb it, and twice on his way out to the mine he has had to stop and yark a gutful of blood out the window ofGary ’s pickup truck, it’s splashed all down the side. in the first tentative and somehow sinister light of the coming day, the drying blood looks like tobacco-juice.
In spite of his need to hurry, he’s stopped dead for a moment by what the headlights show when he arrives at the bottom of the pit. He sits behind the wheel of the old truck with his eyes wide.
There are enough desert animals on the north slope of the China Pit to fill an ark: wolves, coyotes, hopping baldheaded buzzards, flapping owls with eyes like great gold wedding rings; cougars and wildcats and even a few scruffy barncats. There are wild dogs with their ribs arcing against their scant hides in cruel detail-many are escapees from the raggedy-ass commune in the hills, he knows-and running around their feet unmolested are hordes of spiders and platoons of rats with black eyes.
Each of the animals coming out of the China Shaft carries a can tah in its mouth. They lope, flap, and scurry on the pit-road like a flood of weird refugees escaping some underground world. Below them, sitting patiently like customers in a Green Stamp redemption center two days before Christmas-take a number and wait-are more animals. What they’re waiting for is their turn to go into the dark.
Tak begins to laugh with Gary Ripton ‘s vocal cords. “What a hoot!” he exclaims.
Then he drives on to the field office, unlocks the door with Ripton ‘s key, and kills Joe Prudum, the night watchman. Old Joe isn’t much of a night watchman; comes on at dark, doesn ‘t have the slightest idea any-thing’s going on in the pit, and doesn’t think there’s any-thing strange about Gary Ripton showing up first thing in the morning. He ‘s using the washer in the corner to do some laundry, he’s sitting down to have his topsy-turvy version of dinner, and everything ‘s cozy right up to the moment when Ripton puts a bullet in his throat.
That done, Ripton calls the Owl’s Club in town. The Owl’s is open twenty-four hours a day (although, like a vampire, it’s never really alive), it’s where Brad Josephson, he of the gorgeous chocolate skin and long, sloping gut, eats breakfast six days a week. . . and always at this brutally early hour. That will come in handy now. Ripton wants Brad on hand, and quickly, before the black man can be polluted by the can tahs. The can tahs are useful in many ways, but they spoil a man or woman for Tak ‘s greater work.
Ripton knows he can take someone fromMartinez ’s crew if he needs to, perhaps even Pascal himself, but he wants (well, Tak wants, actually) Brad. Brad will be useful in other ways.
How long do the bodies last if they’re healthy? he asks himself as he approaches the phone. How long if the one you push into overdrive hasn’t been incubating a juicy case of cancer to start with?