He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
He thought about it and realized he did. “The spiritual state of unbelief is desperation.”
“Yes. Look down, David!” – – He did, and was shocked to see that the Viet Cong Lookout was no longer in the tree. It now floated, like a magic carpet made out of boards, above a vast, blighted countryside. He could see buildings here and there amid rows of gray and listless plants.
One was a trailer with a bumper-sticker proclaiming the owner a Snapple-drinkin’, Clinton-bashin’ son of a bitch; another was the mining Quonset they’d seen on the way into town; another was theMunicipalBuilding ; another was Bud’s Suds. The grinning leprechaun with the pot of gold under his arm peered out of a dead and strangulated jungle.
“This is the poisoned field,” the man in the reflector sunglasses said. “What’s gone on here makes Agent Orange look like sugar candy. There will be no sweet-ening this earth. It must be eradicated-sown with salt and plowed under. Do you know why?”
“Because it will spread?”
“No. It can’t. Evil is both fragile and stupid, dying soon after the ecosystem it’s poisoned.”
“Then why-”
“Because it’s an affront to God. There is no other reason. Nothing hidden or held back, no fine print.
The poisoned field is a perversity and an affront to God. Now look down again.”
He did. The buildings had slipped behind them. Now the Viet Cong Lookout floated above a vast pit.
From this perspective, it looked like a sore which has rotted through the skin of the earth and into its underlying flesh. The sides sloped inward and downward in neat zigzags like stairs; in a way, looking into this place was like looking into (walk a little faster) a pyramid turned inside out. There were pines in the hills south of the pit, and some growth high up around the edges, but the pit itself was sterile-not even juniper grew here.
On the near side-it would be the north face, David supposed, if the poisoned field was the town ofDesperation -these neat setbacks had broken through near the bottom. Where they had been there was now a long slope of stony rubble. At the site of the landslide, and not too far from the broad gravel road leading down from the rim of the pit, there was a black and gaping hole. The sight of it made David profoundly uneasy. It was as if a monster buried in the desert ground had opened one eye. The land-slide surrounding it made him uneasy, too. Because it looked somehow. . . well.. . planned.
At the bottom of the pit, just below the ragged hole, was a parking area filled with ore freighters, diggers, pickup trucks, and tread-equipped vehicles that looked sort of like World War II tanks. Nearby stood a rusty Quonset hut with a stove-stack sticking crooked out of the roof. WELCOME TO
RATTLESNAKE #2, read the sign on the door. PROVIDING JOBS AND TAX-DOLLARS
TOCENTRAL NEVADA SINCE 1951. Off to the left of the metal building was a squat concrete cube.
The sign on this one was briefer: POWDER MAGAZINE – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
Parked between the two buildings was Collie Entragian’s road-dusty Caprice. The driver’s door stood open and the domelight was on, illuminating an interior that looked like an abattoir. On the dash, a plastic bear with a noddy head had been stuck beside the compass.
Then all that was sliding behind them.
‘You know this place, don’t you, David?”
“Is it the China Pit? It is, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
They swooped closer to the side, and David saw that the pit was, in its way, even more desolate than the poisoned field. There were no whole stones or outcrops in the earth, at least not that he could see; everything had been reduced to an awful yellow rubble.
Beyond the parking area and the buildings were vast heaps of even more radically crumbled rock, piled on black plastic.
“Those are waste dumps,” his guide remarked. “The stuff piled on the plastic is ganguespoil. But the company’s not ready to let it rest, even now. There’s more in it, you see … gold, silver, molybdenum, platinum. And copper, of course. Mostly it’s copper. Deposits so diffuse it’s as if they were blown in there like smoke. Mining it used to be uneconomic, but as the world’s major deposits of ore and metal are depleted, what used to be uneconomic becomes profitable. The oversized Hefty bags are collection pads-the stuff they want precipitates out onto them, and they just scrape it off. It’s a leaching process spell it either way and it comes to the same. They’ll go on working the ground until all of this, which used to be a mountain almost eight thousand feet high, is just dust in the wind.”
“What are those big steps coming down the side of the pit?”
“Benches. They serve as ringroads for heavy equipment around the pit, but their major purpose is to minimize earthslides.”
“It doesn’t look like it worked very well back there.” David hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Up here, either.” They were nearing another area where the look of vast stairs descending into the earth was obliterated by a tilted range of crumbled rock.
“That’s a slope failure.” The Viet Cong Lookout swooped above the slide area. Beyond it, David saw net-works of black stuff that at first looked like cobwebs. As they drew nearer, he saw that the strands of what looked like cobwebbing were actually PVC pipe.
“Just lately it’s been a switchover from rainbirds to emitters.” His guide spoke in the tone of one who recites rather than speaks. David had a moment of déjà vu, then realized why: the man was repeating what Audrey Wyler had already said. “A few eagles died.”
“A few?” David asked, giving Mr. Billingsley’s line.
“All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there’s no shortage of eagles inNevada
. Do you see what they replaced the rainbirds with, David? The big pipes are distribution heads-can taks, let’s say.”
“Big gods.”
“Yes! And those little hollow cords that stretch between them like mesh, those are emitters. Can tahs.
They drip weak sulfuric acid. It frees the ore . . . and rots the ground.
Hang on, David.”
The Viet Cong Lookout banked-also like a flying carpet-with David holding onto the edge of the boards to keep from tumbling off. He didn’t want to fall onto that terrible gouged ground where nothing grew
and streams of brackish fluid flowed down to the plastic collection pads.
They sank into the pit again and passed above the rusty Quonset with the stove-stack, the powder magazine, and the cluster of machinery where the road ended. Up the slope, above the gaping hole, was a wide area pocked with other, much smaller holes. David thought there had to be fifty of them at least, probably more. From each poked a yellow-tipped stick.
“Looks like the world’s biggest gopher colony.”
“This is a blast-face, and those are blast-holes,” his new acquaintance lectured. “The active mining is going on right here. Each of those holes is three feet in diameter and about thirty feet deep. When you’re getting ready to – shoot, you lower a stick of dynamite with a blasting cap on it to the bottom of each hole. That’s the igniter. Then you pour in a couple of wheelbarrows’ worth of ANFO- stands for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Those assholes who blew up theFederalBuilding inOklahoma City used ANFO. It usually comes in pellets that look like white BBs.”
The man in the Yankees cap pointed to the powder magazine.
“Lots of ANFO in there. No dynamite-they used up the last on the day all this started to happen-but plenty of ANFO.”
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”
“Never mind, just listen. Do you see the blast-holes?”
“Yes. They look like eyes.”
“That’s right, holes like eyes. They’re sunk into the porphyry, which is crystalline. When the ANFO is detonated, it shatters the rock. The shattered stuff contains the 7 ore. Get it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“That material is trucked away to the leach pads, the distribution heads and emitters-can tah, can tak-are laid over it, and the rotting process begins. Voilà, there you have it, leach-ore mining at its very finest. But see what the last blast-pattern uncovered, David!”
He pointed at the big hole, and David felt an unpleasant, debilitating coldness begin to creep through him. The hole seemed to stare up at him with a kind of idiot invitation.
“What is it?” he whispered, but he supposed he knew. “Rattlesnake Number One. Also known as the China Mine or the China Shaft or the China Drift. The last series of shots uncovered it. To say the crew was surprised would be an understatement, because nobody in theNevada mining business really believes that old story. By the turn of the century, the Diablo Company was claiming that Number One was simply shut down when the vein played out. But it’s been here, David. All along. And now- “Is it haunted?” David asked, shivering. “It is, isn’t it?”