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 col-lection 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 7 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 the Federal Building in Oklahoma 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 deto-nated, 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. Voila, 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 the Nevada 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.”
“Oh yes,” the man in the Yankees cap said, turning his silvery no-eyes on David. “Yes indeed.”
“Whatever you brought me up here for, I don’t want to hear it!” David cried. “I want you to take me back! Back to my dad! I hate this! I hate being in the Land of the-”
He broke off as a horrible thought struck him. The Land of the Dead, that was what the man had said. He’d called David an exception. But that meant—“Reverend Martin… I saw him on my way to the Woods. Is he…
The man looked briefly down at his old-fashioned radio, then looked back up again and nodded. “Two days after you left, David.”
“Was he drunk.”
“Toward the end he was always drunk. Like Billingsley.”
“Was it suicide.”
“No,” the man in the Yankees cap said, and put a kindly hand on the back of David’s neck. It was warm, not the hand of a dead person. “At least, not conscious suicide. He and his wife went to the beach. They took a picnic. He went in the water too soon after lunch, and swam out too far.”
“Take me back,” David whispered. “I’m tired of all this death.”
“The poisoned field is an affront to God,” the man said. “I know it’s a bummer, David, but-”
“Then let God clean it up!” David cried. “It’s not fair for him to come to me after he killed my mother and my sister-”
“He didn’t-”
“I don’t care! I don’t care! Evcn if he didn’t, he stood aside and let it happen!”
“That’s not true, either.”
David shut his eyes and clapped his hands to his ears. He didn’t want to hear any more.
He refr—sed to hear any more. Yet the man’s voice came through anyway. It was relentless. He would be able to escape it no more than Jonah had been able to escape God. God was as relentless as a bloodhound on a fresh scent. And God was cruel.
“Why are you on earth.” The voice seemed to come from inside his head now.
“I don’t hear you! I don’t hear you!”
“You were put on earth to love God-”
“No!”
“-and serve him.”
“No! Fuck God! Fuck his love! Fuck his service!”
“God can’t make you do anything you don’t want to-”
“Stop it! I won’t listen, I won’t decide! Do you hear. Do you-”
“Shh-listen!”
Not quite against his will, David listened.
PART IV
THE CHINA PIT: GOD IS CRUEL
Johnny was ready to suggest that they just get going-Cynthia could hold the kid’s head in her lap and cushion it from any bumps-when David raised his hands and pressed the heels of his palms to his temples. He took a deeper breath. A moment later his eyes opened and looked up at them: Johnny, Steve, Cynthia, his father. The faces of the two older men were as puffed and discolored as those of journeymen fighters after a bad night in a tank town; all of them looked tired and scared, jumping like spooked horses at the slightest sound. The ragtag remains of The Collie Entragian Survival Society.
“Hi. David,” Johnny said. “Great to have you back. You’re in-”
“-Steve’s truck. Parked near the movie theater. You brought it down from the Conoco station.” David struggled to a sitting position, swallowed, winced. “She must’ve shook me like dice.”
“She did,” Steve said. He was looking at David cau-tiously. “You remember Audrey doing that.”
“No,” David said, “but I was told.”
Johnny shot a glance at Ralph, who shrugged slightly—Don ‘t ask me.
“Is there any water. My throat’s on fire.”
“We got out of the theater in a hurry and didn’t bring anything but the guns,” Cynthia said. “But there’s this.” She pointed to a case of Jolt Cola from which several bottles had already been taken. “Steve keeps it on hand for Mr. Marinville.”
“I’m a freak about it since I quit drinking,” Johnny said. “Gotta be Jolt, God knows why.
It’s warm, but-”
David took one and drank deeply, wincing as the car-bonation bit into his throat but not slowing down on that account. At last, with the bottle three-quarters empty, he put his head back against the side of the truck, closed his eyes, and burped ringingly.
Johnny grinned. “Sixty points!”
David opened his eyes and grinned back.
Johnny held out the bottle of aspirin he had liberated from the Owl’s. “Want a couple.
They’re old, but they seem to work all right.”
David thought it over, then took two and washed them down with the rest of the Jolt.
“We’re getting out,” Johnny said. “We’ll try north first-there are some trailers in the road, but Steve says he thinks we can get around them on the trailer-park side. If we can’t, we’ll have to go south to the pit-mine and then take the equipment road that runs northwest from there back to Highway 50. You and I’ll sit up front with-”
Johnny raised his eyebrows. “Pardon.”
“We have to go up to the mine, okay, but not to leave town.” David’s voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been crying. “We have to go down inside the pit.”
Johnny glanced at Steve, who only shrugged and then looked back at the boy. “What are you talking about, David.” Steve asked. “Your mother. Because it would probably be better for her, not to mention the rest of us, if we-”