But he knocked, all right, and as soon as I opened the door, the little tyke went running in right past me! Right over to the wall he went, to the same bulletin board where Sally put up Mrs Wyler’s letter when it came in, marking it CAN ANYONE HELP THIS LADY in big red-ink letters.
The tyke tapped the aerial photographs of the China Pit we kept tacked on the bulletin board, one after the other. Maybe you had to be there to understand how strange it was, but take my word for it. It was like he’d been in the office a dozen times before.
“Here it is, Daddy!” he said, tapping his way around those pictures. “Here it is! Here it is! Here’s the mine, the silver mine!”
“Well,” I said, kind of laughing, “it’s copper, sonny, but I guess that’s close enough.”
Mr Garin gave me a red-faced look and said, “I’m sorry, we don’t mean to barge in.” Then he barged in himself and grabbed his little boy up. I was some amused. Couldn’t help but be.
He carried the tyke back out to the steps, where he must have thought they belonged. Being from Ohio, I don’t guess he knew we take barging around pretty much for granted out in Nevada. The tyke didn’t kick or have a tantrum, but his eyes never left those photos on the bulletin board. He looked as cute as a papoose, peeking over his Daddy’s shoulder with his little bright eyes. The rest of the family clustered around down below, staring up. The bigger kids were near bursting with excitement, and Mom looked pretty much in the same emotions.
Father said they were from Toledo, then introduced himself, his wife, and the two big kids. “And this is Seth,” he finished up. “Seth is a special child.”
“Why, I thought they were all special,” I said, and stuck out my hand. “Put “er there, Seth; I’m Allen Symes.” He shook with me right smart. The rest of the family looked flabbergasted, his Dad in particular, although I couldn’t see why. My own Dad taught me to shake hands when I was just three; it’s not hard, like learning to juggle or floating aces up to the top of the deck. But things got clearer to me before long.
“Seth wants to know if he can see the mountain,” Mr Garin says, and pointed at the China Pit. The north face does look a little like a mountain. “I think he actually means the mine-”
“Yes!” the tyke says. “The mine! Seth want to see the mine! Seth want to see the silver mine! Hoss! Little Joe! Adam! Hop Sing!”
I busted out laughing at that, it’d been so long since I’d heard those names, but the rest of “em didn’t. They just went on looking at that little boy like he was Jesus teaching the elders in the temple.
“Well,” I says, “if you want to look at the Ponderosa Ranch, son, I believe you can, although it’s a good way west of here. And there’s mine-tours, too, some where they ride you right underground in a real ore gondola. The best is probably the Betty Carr, in Fallen. There’s no tours of the China Pit, though. It’s a working mine, and not as interesting as the old gold and silver shafts. Yonder wall that looks like a mountain to you is nothing but one side of a big hole in the ground.”
“He won’t follow much of what you’re saying, Mr Symes,” his big brother said. “He’s a good brother, but he’s not very swift.” And he tapped the side of his head.
The tyke did get it, though, as was easy to see because he started to cry. Not all loud and spoiled, but soft, like a kid does when he’s lost something he really likes. The rest of them looked all downcast when they heard it, like the family dog had died. The little girl even said something about how Seth never cried. Made me feel more curious than ever. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with them, and it was giving me a hell of an itch. Now I wish I’d just let it go, but I didn’t.
Mr Garin asked if he could talk to me private for a minute or two, and I said sure. He handed off the tyke to his wife-the boy still crying in that soft way, big tears just rolling down his cheeks, and I’ll be damned if Big Sister wasn’t starting to dribble a little bit right along with him. Then Garin came inside the trailer and shut the door.
He told me a lot about little Seth Garin in a short time, but the most important thing was how much they all loved him. Not that Garin ever came out and said so in words (that I might not have trusted, anyway). It just showed. He said that Seth was autistic, hardly ever said a single word you could understand or showed much interest in “ordinary life”, but that when he caught sight of the north wall of China Pit from the road, he started to gabble like crazy, pointing at it the whole time.
“At first we just humored him and kept on driving,” Garin said.
“Usually Seth’s quiet, but he does go off on one of these babbling fits every now and then. June calls them his sermons. But then, when he saw we weren’t turning around or even slowing down, he started to talk. Not just words but sentences. “Go back, please, Seth want to see mine, Seth want to see Hoss and Adam and Little Joe.’””
I know a little about autism; my best friend has a brother in Sierra Four, the state mental facility in Boulder City (outside of Vegas). I have been there with him on several occasions, have seen the autistic at first hand, and am not sure I would’ve believed what Garin was telling me if I hadn’t seen some of it for myself. A lot of the folks in Sierra not only don’t speak, they don’t even move. The worst ones look dead, their eyes glazed, their chests hardly going up and down so you can see.
“He loves Western movies and TV shows,” Mr Garin said, “and all I can figure is that the pit-wall reminds him of something he must have seen on an episode of Bonanza.”
I thought maybe he had even seen it in an episode of Bonanza, although I don’t recall telling Garin that. A lot of those old TV shows filmed scenic footage (what they call “second unit”) out this way, and the China Pit has been in existence since “57, so it’s possible.
“Anyway,” he said, “this is a major breakthrough for Seth-except the word that really fits is miracle. Him talking like he is isn’t all of it, either.”
“Yes,” I said, “he’s really in the world for a change, isn’t he?”
I was thinking of the people in Lacota Hall, where my friend’s brother is. Those folks were never in the world. Even when they were crying or laughing or making other noises, it was like they were phoning it in.
“Yes, he is,” Garin says. “It’s like a bank of lights went on inside him. I don’t know what did it and I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but… is there any way at all you could take us up to the mining operation, Mr Symes? I know you’re not supposed to, and I bet your insurance company would have a fit if they found out, but it would mean so much to Seth. It would mean so much to all of us. We’re on kind of a tight budget, but I could give you forty dollars for your time.”
“I wouldn’t do it for four hundred,” I said. “This kind of thing a man does for free or he doesn’t do at all. Come on. We’ll take one of the ATVs. Your older boy can drive it, if you don’t have any objections. That’s against company regs, too, but might as well be hung for a goat as a lamb, I guess.”
Anyone who’s reading this and maybe judging me for a fool (a reckless fool, at that), I only wish you could have seen the way Bill Garin’s face lit up. I’m sorry as hell for what happened to him and the others in California-which I only know about from his sister’s letter-but believe me when I say that he was happy on that day, and I’m glad I had a chance to make him so.
We had ourselves quite an afternoon even before our “little scare”. Garin did let his older boy, John, drive us out to the pit-wall, and was he excited? I almost think young Jack Garin would have voted me for God, if I’d been running for the job. They were a nice family, and devoted to the little boy. The whole tribe of them. I guess it was pretty amazing for him to just start up talking like he did, but how many people would change all their plans because of a thing like that, right on the spur of the moment, even so? These folks did, and without so much as a word of argument among them, so far as I could tell.