The Regulators

“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.

The tyke jabbered all the way out to the pit, a mile a minute. A lot was gibberish, but not all. He kept talking about the characters on Bonanza, and the Ponderosa, and outlaws, and the silver mines. Some cartoon show was on his mind, too. Motor Cops, I think it was. He showed me an act ion figure from the show, a lady with red hair and a blaster that he could take out of her holster and kind of stick in her hand. Also, he kept patting the ATV and calling it “the Justice Wagon”. Then Jack’d kind of puff up behind the wheel (he must have been driving all of ten miles an hour) and say, “Yeah, and I’m Colonel Henry. Warning, Force Corridor dead ahead!” And they’d all laugh. Me too, because by then I was as swept up in the excitement of it as the rest of them.

I was excited enough so that one of the things he was saying didn’t really hit home until later on. He kept talking about “the old mine”. If I thought anything about that, I guess I thought it was something out of some Bonanza show. It never crossed my mind to think he was talking about Rattlesnake Number One, because he couldn’t know about it! Even the people in Desperation didn’t know we’d uncovered it while blasting just the week before. Hell, that’s why I had so much paperwork to “rassle” with on a Sunday afternoon, writing a report to the home office about what we’d uncovered and listing different ideas on how to handle it.

When the idea that Seth Garin was talking about Rattlesnake Number One did occur to me, I remembered how he’d come running into the office trailer as if he’d been there a million times before. Right across to the photos on the bulletin board he went. That gave me a chill, but there was something else, something I saw after the Garin family had gone on its way to Carson, that gave me an even colder one. I’ll get to it in a bit.

When we got to the foot of the embankment, I swapped seats with Jack and drove us up the equipment road, which is all nicely graveled and wider than some interstates. We crossed the top and went down the far side. They all oohed and aahed, and I guess it is a little more than just a hole in the ground. The pit is almost a thousand feet at its deepest, and cuts through layers of rock that go back all the way to the Paleozoic Era, three hundred and twenty-five million years ago. Some layers of the porphyry are very beautiful, being crammed with sparkly purple and green crystals we call “skarn garnets”. From the top, the earth-moving equipment on the pit floor looks the size of toys. Mrs Garin made a joke about how she didn’t like heights and might have to throw up, but you know, it’s not such a joke at that. Some people do throw up when they come over the edge and see the drop inside!

Then the little girl (sorry, can’t remember her name, might have been Louise) pointed over across, down by the pit-floor, and said, “What’s that hole with all the yellow tapes around it? It looks like a big black eye.”

“That’s our find of the year,” I said. “Something so big it’s still a dead secret. I’ll tell you if you can keep it one a while longer. You will, won’t you? I might get in trouble with my company otherwise.”