Ron quickened his pace, his calves burning, keeping his eyes open for evidence of tunnels not on his map. He’d followed dozens of faint trails to dead end mines in the last ten days, peered down scores of open shafts, rattled the locks on handfuls of metal gates, always looking for a sign, always listening for Levi’s voice. He crossed from the valley’s shadow into the sunlight, and even this early in the morning the rays heated his shirt. It would be a hot one today.
The road ended at the tumbled remains of a small mill. Busted beams pointed skyward, a skirt of rotten wood at their feet. Ron rested for a moment, his hand against a gray post. Splinters flaked onto his skin. Behind the ruin a narrow path vanished over a ridge. Weeds grew into the twin grooves that were too narrow for an automobile. He imagined steel-rimmed wagon wheels and a cart of ore making its way down the road behind a team of horses. Time seemed irrelevant here. It could be 1880 again, or 2080; the mountains wouldn’t know the difference. But he wasn’t timeless, and the clock counted; every minute passed was another minute that Levi suffered alone. Could an eight-year-old die of fright? What if he believed his daddy had forgotten him? Ron whimpered at the thought.
His photocopied map called this the Sunderson Mill. Above it were several mines: West Yellow Dog, New Baltimore, and Crossroad. Ron spread the map over his knee. Small Xs indicating digs crowded the gulch. There could be ventilation shafts, drainage tunnels, powder storage crypts, false starts, dead ends and full-bore excavations that needed checking.
It would take all day.
“Come with me, boy,” said Charles, his hands shaking. It had taken him several minutes to push open the cabin door. He couldn’t shake the impression of the cloud he’d seen around his house in the morning. It seemed to hover still, insubstantial, but present just the same. The sun shone mutedly through it, and the air felt cooler than it did ten feet away.
“It won’t work,” said the boy. He sat on the edge of his bed, his dark hair disheveled, his gaze steady and challenging.
Charles swallowed hard. “What won’t work?”
“What you are planning.” The boy came toward him, across the cabin’s single room.
Charles backed away into the sunlight, gripping the hammer hanging from his belt. The weight of his satchel tugged at his shoulder. For a second he envisioned beating the boy down where he stood, before he could get away. He forced his fingers from the hammer.
“We are taking a walk.”
“I know.” The boy strode past him and up the road out of town.
Charles watched him, his breath caught in his throat. Suddenly the air seemed to clear, and the sun pressed against him. Had it always been this way around the boy? Had he been in a daze from the moment the child was born?
It was as if the boy followed a trail traced for him in the dirt. He walked in the road’s middle, barely giving way when a wagon came toward him. The horse’s nostrils flared at his smell.
Charles caught up to him when they turned onto the Sunderson Mill Road. The mines above it had gone bad the year before, and the mill was closed.
“The mountains hold things, Papa.” The boy’s hands hung straight at his side, as if he were standing at attention, not hiking a steep road.
He had no words to say to him. Am I the monster? thought Charles. The boy’s mother wouldn’t want this. Have I done something to deserve a curse? Every step hurt. Part of him wanted to run away. He could do it: leave the boy on the road, catch the new train out of town, and be in Denver before anyone knew. His family lived back east.
Another part denied that anything was wrong. Charles thought, what if I’m insane? My boy is strange, for sure, but he’s not evil. What child growing in the mountains with a dead mother and a father who worked the mines wouldn’t mature differently?
And a third part wanted to fall on the boy like a bear and rend him, bloody bone from bloody bone.
“Keep going,” Charles said when the boy slowed at the mill. The windows were already broken and its door hung askew.
“Don’t you love me, Papa?” he said. The boy looked at him sardonically. “A Papa should love his son.”
The trail climbed as quickly as stairs for a hundred yards, while the afternoon sun touched the mountaintop before them. Charles choked on the words, “Of course, I love you.” And he knew that he did. He loved him even as he wanted to kill him, even as he was afraid. Was this right? He thought of sick children sweating in their fevers, dead children. “They’ll burn, Papa,” the boy had said.
At the ridge’s top, the trail flattened and split. Winding to the right, it led to West Yellow Dog, a fifty-foot drift that started with a yard-wide vein of quartz and wire gold but petered into low-grade ore that wasn’t worth the cost of the powder to extract it. The middle trail ended at the New Baltimore, a failed attempt to find West Yellow Dog’s wire gold by coming at it laterally. Charles had worked the New Baltimore for six months before the owners shut it down.
He’d never been in the Crossroad on the left trail, but, as the hard rock Cornishman who told him about it said, “The claim was snakebit from the beginning.” The rumor was that the first prospector had been drilling into the rock to set a charge, and when he hit the drill for the last time, it disappeared into the rock. There was a tunnel already there. A silly story, but the claim didn’t pay out, and there had been accidents.
They took the turn to the left, around a granite wall, out of the sun and into the stone bowl that held the mine. Rock surrounded them on three sides, like a small arena. The sound of Charles’ hard-soled boots echoed. At the far side, a metal gate held closed by a clasp lock marked the mine’s entrance.
“You’re going to be staying here, boy.” Charles removed a chisel from his satchel, set its edge against the lock, raised the hammer, then paused. Always he judged before he struck. Was the chisel set correctly? Would the hammer do its job? There could never be a strike without the pause for judgement, where a mistake could be saved. The metal’s sharp report reverberated off the rocks. Another blow broke it, then Charles pulled the door open; it screeched against the stiffness in its hinges. He’d never seen a mine entrance like the Crossroad’s. The floor looked worn smooth, as if thousands of feet had marched on it through the years. How had the miners done that?
“Don’t you love me, Papa?” the boy said again.
Charles didn’t look at him. From his satchel he removed a blanket, candles, a small bundle of food and a water bottle. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You must not be my Papa.” He didn’t sound insincere this time. “My Papa loves me. He’ll find me, my Papa.”
“Just get in!”
Charles could barely see the new lock he put on the door through the tears.
Behind the iron gate, he heard the boy move, a large sound, as if what stirred in the tunnel had suddenly grown huge. He fell back. Impossibly, the door stirred in its iron frame, and for a second Charles thought the inch-thick bolts might pull from the rock. He scuttled away. Even at the edge of the granite arena, when Charles looked at the mine entrance, he could hear the boy behind the gate, breathing loud, his heart throbbing. The sky grew dark and the air thick. A noxious cloud seeped around the door’s edges, filled the stone chamber, its tendrils crawling on the floor toward Charles. The boy said, his voice full of old mining timbers and cold, wet stone a thousand feet deep, “Papa?”
Charles fled.