“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 fromReno 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 Chinese, 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 traveled, 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 there, 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 hootheels 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?”
“Not a singleton,” Johnny said. “A pair.” He looked up, not quite smiling. “Maybe,” he said, “they’re Chinese fiddlebacks.”
Tak! Can ah wan me. Ah lah.
The cougar’s eyes opened. She got up. Her tail began switching restlessly from side to side. It was almost time. Her ears cocked forward, twitching, at the sound of someone entering the room behind the white glass. She looked up at it, all rapt attention, a net of measurement and focus. Her leap would have to be perfect to carry her through, and perfection was exactly what the voice in her head demanded.
She waited, that small, squalling growl once more rising up from her throat … but now it came out of her mouth as well as from her nostrils, because her muzzle was wrinkled back to show her teeth. Little by little, she began to tense down on her haunches.
Almost time.
Almost time. Tak ah ten.
Billingsiey poked his head into the ladies’ first, and shone his light at the window. The bottles were still in place. He had been afraid that a strong gust of wind might open the window wide enough to knock some of them off the ledge, causing a false alarm, but that hadn’t happened and now he thought it very unlikely that it would. The wind was dying.
The storm, a summer freak the likes of which he had never seen, was winding down.
Meantime, he had this problem. This thirst to quench.
Except, in the last five years or so, it had come to seem less and less like a thirst than an itch, as if he had contracted some awful form of poison ivy-a kind that affected one’s brain instead of one’s skin. Well, it
didn’t matter, did it? He knew how to take care of his problem, and that was the important thing. And it kept his mind off the rest, as well. The madness of the rest. if it had just been danger, someone out of control waving a gun around, that he thought he could have faced, old or not, drunk or not. But this was nothing so cut and dried. The geologist woman kept insisting that it was, that it was all Entragian, but Billingsley knew better. Because Entragian was different now. He’d told the others that, and Ellen Carver had called him crazy. But.
But how was Entragian different? And why did he, Billingsley, somehow feel that the change in the deputy was important, perhaps vital, to them right now? He didn’t know.
He should know, it should be as clear as the nose on his face, but these days when he drank everything got swimmy, like he was going senile. He couldn’t even remember the name of the geologist woman’s horse, the mare with the strained leg- “Yes I can,” he murmured. “Yes I can, it was Was what, you old rummy? You don’t know, do you?
“Yes I do, it was Sally!” he cried triumphantly, then walked past the boarded-up firedoor and pushed his way into the men’s room. He shone his flashlight briefly on the potty. “Sally, that’s what it was!” He shifted his light to the wall and the smoke-breathing horse which galloped there. He couldn’t remember drawing it-he’d been in a blackout, he supposed-but it was indubitably his work, and not bad of its kind.
He liked the way the horse looked both mad and free, as if it had come from some other world where goddesses still rode bareback, sometimes leaping whole leagues as they went their wild courses.
His memories suddenly clarified a little, as if the picture on the wall had somehow opened his mind.
Sally, yes. A year ago, give or take. The rumors that the mine was going to be reopened were just beginning to solidify into acknowledged fact. Cars and trucks had started to show up in the parking lot of the Quonset hut that served as mining headquarters, planes had started to fly into the airstrip south of town, and he had been told one night- right here in The American West, as a matter of fact, drinking with the boys-that there was a lady geologist living Out at the old Rieper place. Young. Single.