“In what sense outrageous?”
Shelburne slipped his pack off one shoulder and slid it around to access the stash pocket. He retrieved something. Shouldered the pack.
I said, “What’s in your hand?”
He displayed a box of matches.
“Good God man,” Walter said, “you’re standing in mountain misery.”
I looked at the brush, some kind of groundcover, low-lying ferns. My nose stung. It had not stopped stinging since I’d crashed through the maze. Now I realized I’d found the source of the odd odor. It came from the ferns.
“That’s the point,” Shelburne said. “The thing about mountain misery is this time of year its leaves are coated with resin. Flammable as hell.”
I said, “Are you out of your mind?”
“Far from it. There’s a pond behind you. But it won’t be necessary. If I may?”
Walter gave a brusque nod.
“Here’s how it works. You’ve got two boys pretty much brought up in the wild. Daring each other to do the outrageous. You’ve got a father who leaves them alone with dangerous toys. Some dads give their boys boxing gloves to pound out the rivalry. Ours gave us all this. So we made bets. Always a dime.” He paused and made a slow survey of the jungle, of the rim. Then his focus snapped back to us. “Let’s pretend Henry is standing here with me in the misery. We’re facing each other. Use your imagination.”
I didn’t need to. Henry was parked in my mind.
“Here’s how it played,” Shelburne said. “We flipped the dime to see who went first. I chose heads. The dime landed heads-up. I went first.” Shelburne lit a match. He watched it burn down. When the flame neared his fingers he blew it out. He snapped the matchstick in half and put it in his pocket. He took another match from the box. “Henry’s turn.” Shelburne lit the second match. “I’m playing Henry here, of course.” Shelburne watched the match burn down. Blew it out. Snapped it, pocketed it.
I watched, uneasy. If Henry was watching, what was he thinking?
Shelburne took out a third match. “My turn again.” He lit the match. “Mind you, we went through a lot of matches before we got up the nerve to finish the game. But I’m going to fast forward to the last turn. My turn.” He watched the match burn down. Before the flame could lick his skin he opened his fingers and let the match drop. It fell onto a netting of fern. There was a tiny explosion, and then a tiny flame licked along the adjacent ferns in a delicate dance. Oily black smoke curled up.
Reflexively, I reached for my water bottle.
Before I could unscrew the cap, Shelburne stomped out the tiny conflagration.
When the fire was fully extinguished, I said, “Just to be sure I’ve got this straight — which one of you tried to set the forest on fire?”
“I did. Henry flinched. Blew out his match.”
The smell of rotting overcooked ferns turned my stomach. I felt a bit like Alice navigating her inside-out world. Henry Shelburne was supposed to be the mercurial kid, the one who didn’t understand limits, but now Robert Shelburne was demonstrating the reverse.
Robert Shelburne waded out of the mountain misery. His boots and pant cuffs were streaked with pitchy black resin. “By the way, the game wasn’t playing with fire. It was reclaiming the gold.”
Walter leaned in. “What do you mean?”
“Right around here was a remainder of the sluiceway system. Henry and I found it, nearly overgrown with mountain misery. Full of sediment, and the sediment was laced with amalgam.” He glanced at me. “The gold-mercury mix.”
I remembered. Bonded like brothers.
“You went after the gold,” Walter said.
“We went after the gold,” Shelburne agreed. “Bled off the mercury with fire.”
“You vaporized the mercury?”
“We vaporized the mercury.”
Walter shook his head.
I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“We stayed upwind. No harm done.”
“No harm? Does your brother not have mercury poisoning?”
Shelburne shot me a hard look. “No harm that day.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning no harm that day but I put an idea in my brother’s head. He took it from there. He kept on messing around with mercury, on his own. Burning old riffle blocks impregnated with amalgam. Panning slugs of amalgam from the rivers and then cooking them over an open fire to separate out the gold. And Henry thought he could keep dancing away from the vapor. More like dancing with the devil.”
I shook my head.
“And now,” Shelburne said, “he leaves me the dimes. You asked about the message? Blame. Short and sweet. And I get it.” He shouted once again, to the sky, “I get it, Bro.”
I said, suddenly chilled, “So what does he want?”
“Fuck if I know. Apology? Admission of guilt?”
First I’d heard Robert Shelburne use that particular expletive. First I’d seen him lose any manner of control. I took note.
Walter said, “Is there a chance he wants revenge? To harm you?”
“He’s had years to nurse that grudge. He could have sent me a bucket of dimes a hundred times over.”
“Then why now?”
“My best guess? Culmination. A lifetime of failures. Dad dies. Henry’s doing his last shot at finding the legacy. And maybe he’s tying up loose ends.” Shelburne suddenly grinned, tight. “Don’t worry. He’s not a violent man. If he wants to settle a grudge with me, it’ll be just that. The two of us. All I need from you is to get me to him. I’ll take it from there.”
“Still,” I said, “you’re dealing with that chaotic mind.”
Shelburne took a moment. “Let me ask you something. You told me your brother died. How did that happen?”
“How is that relevant?”
“If you’d rather not…”
I said, “He had hemophilia — a blood-clotting disorder. He fell and hit his head. Bled into the brain.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“So was I. How is this relevant?”
“What if you’d been able to… catch him? What if you’d been there?”
“I was there.”
Walter put a hand on my arm.
I added, “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Shelburne said, “What if you could go back in time, and pay attention?”
“What a damn fool question.”
“Maybe so. But I don’t want to be asking myself that damn fool question some day.”
9
We set off.
We rounded the pond, giving the cattails and the spongy soil a wide berth, circling to the far sit of the great pit, passing the crumbling mouth of a dark tunnel. The little stream we’d crossed earlier appeared here, braiding with another little stream, ferrying muck and sediment into the tunnel.
I peered inside. No light. The sound of flowing water. A blast of cold air. I shivered.
“No,” Shelburne said, “he won’t be in there.”
He doesn’t like enclosed spaces. I got it. Claustrophobic, among his other impairments.
Shelburne led us around the tunnel and out of the giant mining pit and over the lip down into the canyon below.
Still the Trail of Trial and Error, he said.
And now, the fast way down to our next target.
He took us by way of the bouldery outflow of the tunnel, the escape route of sludge and debris once washed out of the sluiceway and into the drainage tunnel, where the pit once and still disgorged its waste, where the father taught the boys to pan the tailings for pickings. Robert Shelburne shouted “Henry” and we listened for a moment to the hiss of water streaming out of the tunnel and boiling over the boulders as it picked up speed on the down slope.