The hosed-out world of the pit was now jungly, bristling with pines and alders and willows and brush that criss-crossed in a maze that could screen an army of hikers.
The soil was fine-grained colluvium eroded from above, with lenses of pebbly gravel and clay. I looked for, and did not see, footprints.
We crossed a little stream — runoff, I presumed, from the upcanyon watershed. The stream wandered into a thicket of brush.
I wondered if there was a trail down here. I had no idea which way to go.
Shelburne did. As ever, he took the lead and we followed and damned if he didn’t discover a path.
We passed through a tunnel of pines and emerged into a small clearing where old mining equipment was on display. My attention caught on the huge lengths of rusted pipe, jumbled like pick-up sticks. I stopped, stared. A man could hide inside that pipe.
Shelburne saw me looking. “He hates enclosed spaces.”
My Henry would have been in there.
“Not hiding in the water cannon, either.”
Beyond the pipes was a giant rusted cannon that looked like something out of a Civil War textbook. I still had to wrap my head around the idea that it had shot water, not iron.
“Let’s go,” Shelburne said.
Walter held up a hand. “A moment.” He took off his pack and rummaged for his parka.
I looked at a long wooden open-top box set upon a frame.
Shelburne saw me looking. “That, he liked. It’s a sluice box. Miners ran a slurry of water and gravel through it. The riffles trapped the heavy grains of gold. The lighter stuff, they trapped with mercury. The metals mix into an amalgam. Bonded like brothers — as my dad liked to say.” Shelburne snagged his water bottle. He toasted the sluice. “Dad let us play here. He brought vials of mercury and a baggie of gold dust. And a bottle of water. The gold was the prize. The mercury the waste.” Shelburne drank.
I wondered if Dad put it that way to his sons. Robert, you’re the prize. Henry, you’re waste.
I drifted over to the sluice box. I glimpsed something inside, caught between riffles. Something silvery. I thought, if that’s a drop of mercury in there right now, then Henry Shelburne AKA Quicksilver was playing some goddamn stupid game.
I moved for a closer look. It had disappeared. I blinked. Glint of sunlight on a nailhead or something. Now you see it, now you don’t. Sunlight’s playing hide and seek.
“Here’s more numbers for you,” Shelburne said. “The miners used ten pounds of mercury for every foot of sluice. Eighty thousand pounds a year. Thirty percent of it washed away. Poof! I’d never green-light a project with that level of waste.”
I thought, he’s got a lot of numbers at the ready. Who remembers precise numbers like that? Especially when you learned this stuff as a kid. If it were me, I’d just say the miners put a shitload more mercury into the ground than they took out in gold.
Shelburne turned to Walter. “Not Dogtown, hey?”
“No,” Walter said. He shouldered his backpack. Zipped his parka. “Rather, the other extreme.”
I felt I ought to say something to my partner. Yeah, you fell in love with a Hollywood facade and the reality is your grown-up hobby has a real dark history but I understand that you can love something in the whole and yet not love every part of it. I understand why you wanted to avoid this place. And I’m certainly no paragon of consistency. I’m an environmentalist who uses paper towels wantonly. Who lives the pure life?
I said, “Who lives the pure life?”
Both Shelburne and Walter looked at me in some surprise.
I turned away. My field of view altered a smidge. Enough to get a fresh look into the sluice box, to see that the something silvery that had caught my eye wasn’t a nailhead. It was a dime.
I said, “Somebody dropped a dime.”
Shelburne was suddenly beside me, hands braced on the rough rim of the sluice box. Strong hands. Manicured. City-boy hands on rough wood. Fingers flexed. Knuckles white.
Walter joined us. “Somebody dropped a number of dimes.”
I looked further. Dimes scattered throughout the sluice box. All of them shiny. Innocent of dust. How long could a dime lay in a sluice box before acquiring at least a freckling of dust? Hours? If that.
Shelburne picked up a dime.
Walter said, “Is this significant?”
Shelburne spun. Scanning the trees around the clearing. “Give me a minute,” he said. Voice hoarse. Choked. He jammed his water bottle into the pocket and shoved off. Just short of a run.
Walter and I stood flatfooted. A minute to do what?
“We don’t want to lose him,” Walter said.
Hell no, we sure didn’t want to lose him, not down here in this jungle. We plunged back into the maze where Shelburne had disappeared.
But we had already fallen behind. Although I could hear him rustling through the vegetation up ahead, I could not see him. No means of judging distance, no map to consult because quite clearly the way through the maze altered season by season as the underbrush crept this way and that. I shouted “wait” and Shelburne somewhere up ahead muttered something in reply but it did not matter because his voice was the clue and so I followed the bushwhacked path to the left instead of to the right. I heard Walter behind me, the rock hammer and trenching tool tied to his pack rattling like coins in a pocket. Like dropped dimes. Only they weren’t dropped, right? They were placed, scattered throughout the sluice box so as not to be missed. Henry placed them. Who else? And spooked his brother in the bargain.
And now as I crashed through the woods my sense of smell kicked in. My nose stung. There was that odd odor, much stronger now than when I’d first sniffed it hiking up the ego-blazed trail into the Shelburne family neighborhood. It was a medicinal smell. It was like bitter greens I’d once boiled to oblivion. It had an undercurrent of rotting sweet fruit. I turned to Walter and said “what’s that stink?” but he was too far back to hear me or too short on breath to reply.
And then I broke free of the willow jungle and waded hip-deep into cattails and I saw Shelburne ahead, on the far side of a stinking pond red with iron-rich silt.
He was wading through a field of brush, peering into a thicket of pines beyond.
I shouted.
He stiffened. Turned. Lifted a hand to us.
We skirted the pond and joined him.
I expelled the words. “What. The. Hell?”
“I thought….” He passed a hand across his eyes. “Thought I’d find Henry.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No.”
“But the dimes said he came this way?”
“Yes.”
Walter said, “Call for him.”
“Haven’t I been? For the past three hours?” Shelburne lifted his palms. “Fine, I’ll shout my fool head off. Henry Henry Henry Henry!”
There was no reply.
Shelburne glanced up. Around.
I followed suit, looking up to the rim of the pit. There were a dozen viewpoints. More. I looked around us. Jungle. Woods.
Walter said, “And if he’s watching?”
“Christ.” Shelburne flashed a grim smile. Shook his head. “Christ, Henry.” Shelburne suddenly shouted to the sky, “You want the dog and pony show?”
There was no reply.
Walter said, thinly, “Why don’t you give us the dog and pony show?”
After a long moment Shelburne said, “Why not?”
Walter folded his arms.
“It starts with the dime,” Shelburne said. “Did you ever hear the expression you’re on my dime? Dad loved that expression. He wasn’t talking allowance, he was talking I own you.” Shelburne unbuckled his hip belt. “So of course Henry and I would challenge each other to do outrageous shit, betting a dime on it. In particular, there was the time I flicked the dime into the sluice box, making a particular outrageous bet.”