Crown of Dust. Mary Volmer
the old man’s barley bread. ‘The first fortune is always the hardest, wettest, coldest, meanest son-a-bitch you ever chase,’ he said. His voice was a gravel rasp, high-pitched, and in this way reassuring to Alex. Already her shaking hands had stilled some. ‘They don’t tell you that in those shipping fliers, do they? They don’t need to. Gold! That’s all they need, save the ink and paper. A man’s not bound to read between the lines with a word like that to tempt him.’
He emptied his pipe on the stump next to him and pointed up at her with a finger more bone than skin.
‘I see myself in you, is what I’m saying, and I’m telling you it’s not as easy as they make it sound, finding gold, getting rich. Nothing is, is it? A man can lose himself in the search—forget anything else ever mattered to him but gold, forget who he was and what he valued ‘fore he came. It’s a danger, like scurvy—sneak up and take your teeth ‘fore you know it.’
He bared a set of blackened incisors, yellow at their roots, but Alex’s eyes lingered on the gold pans, and the word gold rested there on her shoulder as if it meant to follow her wherever she was going. She found herself reaching for her money pouch, giving the man a coin from her precious stash, though she knew better by now than to put faith in words, even those as shiny as gold. A crooked grin tugged his whiskers as he tucked the coin into his boot.
‘What you do is, you find a likely spot, one that smells rich, like a rusted wheel axle. Hunch down, like this—’ He eased off his stool and bent down to demonstrate, his knees jutting on either side of his shoulders. He mimicked scooping up a pan of soil and water. ‘Then you just rotate it round in a little circle. All in the wrist, see—’ His hands were small and slender with brown sunspots dotting the backs like islands. The crease lines in his hands were mirrored in his face, and a thin white beard was the only trace of hair on his head. He moved the pan in circles. ‘The lighter stuff, sand and such—worthless. That’ll slough off first, so what’s left at the bottom, see, is the black sand, the heavy stuff. And the gold.’ When he stood, the man’s back remained curved like the keel of a boat, and he had to crane his neck to look directly at Alex. “Course, most nowadays is using the rocker and long tom, if they don’t want to go down a hole, but thems require at least three to work right. Not long ago, miner by hisself only needed his pan. I know, I was here in ‘47 taking gold ‘fore anyone know’d the name Cal-i-for-ni-a.’
She takes a deep breath. The smell is organic, cedar bark, fermenting mud and mushrooms. No rust. She rotates her wrists clockwise. Small flecks of white, black, gold and grey swirl in suspension, spilling over the edge of the pan, staining her crotch and the front of her flannel. She sucks in her breath at the chill, dusts off the sand and silt, and bends down again, allowing her knees to jut on either side of her as the old man had done. She scoops less sand this time, less water.
She sets the pan like a boat on the water and watches it float downstream, catches it before it’s swept away. She gives the pan a spin, it twirls like a top, throwing flashes of sunlight into her eyes. She scoops another bit of water and sand, this time angling the pan away. She works slowly, biting the end of her tongue, losing herself in the water and silt. Her forearms burn and she uses the pain to keep her mind from wandering back into memory. The manzanita rustles behind her.
She turns to face the teardrop ears of a doe frozen midstep. Its tail twitches; its ears rotate, listening. Its pregnant belly is stretched taut. Liquid eyes fix beyond Alex, beyond the end of the clearing. Alex turns to look and the deer, even with her big belly, springs forward in two arching leaps before again halting, motionless.
Alex’s ears twitch. Her heart begins to thud. She follows the direction of the doe’s gaze to find herself in line with the muzzle of a rifle.
All she can see now is the gun, the tip round and glinting silver, and she thinks, how quickly, how effortlessly they found me, before I even knew where I was going. She rises to her feet and the doe braces to run, every muscle and ligament tense. The gunshot shatters the stillness; the metal whizzes like a breath past her ear. She hears metal strike flesh and flesh thump to the ground, and only now does Alex begin to shake, the instinct to run so strong she is paralysed.
John Thomas leaps from the manzanita grove. ‘I got ‘em, Jed,’ he yells, eyeballing Alex.
‘You get ‘em?’ says Jed, crashing through the brush behind John Thomas.
‘I said I got ‘em.’
The two men crouch over the body as it slides into death. Its eyes stare, too pained for fright, and Alex can’t help but look down where the bullet has pierced the belly. The taut skin has split around the wound and a small, hoofed leg twitches through the hole.
‘Cut the throat,’ says Jed.
‘Be dead in a minute.’
‘Cut her now, goddamn it,’ says Jed. He grabs his own knife and slashes the doe’s throat. Blood surges crimson from its jugular. He stabs the belly and the fawn’s leg stills. He pauses a moment, letting the blood drain, then guts the animal, leaving the rope-like entrails steaming on the grass, and thrusts the small body of the fawn behind him, out of his line of sight, directly in front of Alex.
There are memories here, gathering like flies on the veintracked birth-sac.
‘Alex?’ says Jed.
The smell of blood, thick enough to choke her…
‘You all right? Alex?’ She opens her eyes. The doe’s legs drape about Jed’s shoulders like a shawl.
‘Nearly cost us the kill,’ says John Thomas.
‘Well now…’ says Jed, and then, grunting under the weight, he heads down the trail to town.
‘Don’t know what the hell you’re doing up here anyway. Hey—you deaf?’ says John Thomas, waving his hand in front of her face.
He’s only just taller than her, but far bigger through the shoulders. The pupils of his eyes are no bigger than pinheads. The curl of his lip disgusts her and for a moment it is this man dead on the grass before her, his belly ripped throat to gullet.
‘I hear you,’ she says.
John Thomas steps closer, as if hearing the challenge in her tone, and she’s not so sure he won’t shoot if she runs. She’s not sure if she cares, but finds herself backing away, splashing into the creek. Cold water tugs at the hem of her trousers, soaks through the toes of her boots. John Thomas grins.
‘Claim jumping’s a hanging crime. You ever see a man hanged? No? Dangles there, like a dead fish. Broken neck, if you’re lucky. Quick that way. Don’t cry, though, don’t piss your pants,’ he says, and he aims the rifle at her water-stained crotch. ‘I’d shoot yah if you was to live through the drop. First in the balls. One POP, then the other—POP, POP. And then in the kneecaps—’
‘Then the toes, then the elbows, then the stomach. Seems to me I heard this before sometime, Johnny. Seems to me David, here, has too,’ Limpy hollers. He emerges from the upstream trail and David follows, his shoulders alive with compact energy.
‘Limpy, this ain’t no goddamned business of yours,’ says John Thomas, but the gun falls to his side and Alex steps away.
‘Yours neither, if I remember right,’ Limpy replies.
‘I made this claim four months ago.’
‘And ain’t been back for two. Ten days, Johnny. It’s the law. Right, David?’
David’s large hands strain white around the pick. His nostrils flare. Beneath the upturned brim of his Panama hat, his eyes pierce John Thomas.
‘And don’t try and tell me you was here workin’ this claim all the time, ‘cause me and David been by every day and never seen you. You ain’t even staked it.’
Limpy winks at Alex, and John Thomas’s face turns red to the roots of his eyebrows.
‘Ain’t no gold here, no how,’ John Thomas says. As he stomps away, he kicks the fawn with