The Regulators (37 page)

“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 ATV
S
. 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 action 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 awhile longer. You will, won't you? I might get in trouble with my company otherwise.”

They promised, and I thought telling them was safe enough, them being through-travellers and all. Also, I thought the little boy would like to hear about it, him being so crazy about
Bonanza
and all. And, as I said, it never crossed my mind until later to think
he already knew about it
. Why would it, for God's sake?

“That's the old Rattlesnake Number One,” I said. “At least, that's what we
think
it is. We uncovered it while we were blasting. The front part of the Rattlesnake caved in back in 1858.”

Jack Garin wanted to know what was inside. I said we didn't know, no one had been in there on account of the MSHA regulations. Mrs. Garin (June) wanted to know if the company would be exploring it later, and I said maybe, if we could get the right permits. I didn't tell them any lies, but I did skirt the truth a bit. We'd gotten up the keep-out tapes like MSHA says to do, all right, but that didn't mean MSHA knew about our find. We uncovered it purely by accident—shot off a blast-pattern pretty much like any other and when the spill stopped rolling and the dust settled, there it was—but no one in the company was sure if it was the kind of accident we wanted to publicize.

There would have been some powerful interest if news of it got out, that's for sure. According to the stories, forty or fifty Chinese were sealed up inside when the mine caved in, and if so, they'd still be there, preserved like mummies in an Egyptian pyramid.
The history buffs would've had a field day with just their clothing and mining gear, let alone the bodies themselves. Most of us on-site were pretty interested, too, but we couldn't do much exploring without wholehearted approval from the Deep Earth brass in Phoenix, and there wasn't anyone I worked with who thought we'd get it. Deep Earth is not a nonprofit organization, as I'm sure anyone reading this will understand, and mining, especially in this day and age, is a high-risk operation. China Pit had only been turning a profit since 1992 or so, and the people who work there never get up in the morning completely sure they'll still have a job when they get to the work-site. Much is dependent on the per-pound price of copper (leachbed mining is not cheap), but even more has to do with the environmental issues. Things are a little better lately, the current crop of pols has at least some sense, but there are still something like a dozen “injunctive suits” pending in the county or Federal courts, filed by people (mostly the “greens”) who want to shut us down. There were a lot of people—including myself, I might as well say—who didn't think the top execs would want to add to those problems by shouting to the world that we'd found an old mine site,
probably of great historical interest. As Yvonne Bateman, an engineer pal of mine, said just after the round of blast-field shots uncovered the hole, “It would be just like the tree-huggers to try and get the whole pit designated a historical landmark, either by the Feds or by the Nevada Historical Commission. It might be the way to stop us for good that they are always looking for.” You can call that attitude paranoid if you want (plenty do), but when a fellow like me knows there are 90 or 100 men depending on the mine to keep their families fed, it changes your perspective and makes you cautious.

The daughter (Louise?) said it looked spooky to her, and I said it did to me, too. She asked if I'd go in it on a dare and I said no way. She asked if I was afraid of ghosts and I said no, of cave-ins. It's amazing that any of the shaft was still up. They drove it straight into hornfels and crystal rhyolite—leftovers from the volcanic event that emptied the Great Basin—and that's pretty shaky stuff even when you're not shooting off ANFO charges all over the place. I told her I wouldn't go in there even on a double dare unless and until it was shored up with concrete and steel every five feet.
Never knowing I'd be in there so deep I couldn't see the sun before the day was over!

I took them to the field office and got them hard-hats, then took them out and showed them all around—diggings, tailings, leachbeds, sorters, and heavy equipment. We had quite a field-trip for ourselves. Little Seth had pretty much quit talking then, but his eyes were as bright as the garnets we are always finding in the spoil-rock!

All right, I've come to the “little scare” that has caused me so many doubts and bad dreams (not to mention a bad case of conscience, no joke for a Mormon who takes the religion stuff pretty seriously). And it didn't seem so “little” to any of us at the time, and doesn't to me now, if I'm to tell the truth. I have been over it and over it in my mind, and while I was in Peru (which is where I was, looking at bauxite deposits, when Audrey Wyler's letter of inquiry came in to the Deep Earth post box in Desperation), I dreamed of it a dozen or more times. Because of the heat, maybe. It was hot inside the Rattlesnake Mine. I have been in a lot of shaft-mines in my time, and usually they are chilly or downright cold. I have read that some of the deep gold mines in S. Africa are warm, but I have never been
in any of those. And this wasn't warm but hot. Humid, too, like in a greenhouse.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I don't want to do that. What I want is to tell it straight through, end to end, and thank God nothing like it will ever happen again. In early August, not two weeks after all this happened, the whole works collapsed. Maybe there was a little temblor deep down in the Devonian, or maybe the open air had a corrosive effect on the exposed support timbers. I'll never know for sure, but down it came, a million tons of shale and schist and limestone. When I think how close Mr. Garin and his little boy came to being under all that when it went (not to mention Mr. Allen Symes, Geologist Extraordinaire), I get the willies.

The older boy, Jack, wanted to see Mo, our biggest digger. She runs on treads and works the inner slopes, mostly digging out benches at fifty-foot intervals. There was a time in the early '70s when Mo was the biggest digger on Planet Earth, and most kids—the boys especially—are fascinated with her. Big boys too! Garin wanted to see her “close up” as much as young Jack did, and I assumed Seth would feel the same way. I was wrong about that, though.

I showed them the ladder that goes up
Mo's side to the operator's cab, which is almost 100 feet above the ground. Jack asked if they could go up and I said no, that was too dangerous, but they could take a stroll on the treads if they wanted. Doing that is quite an experience, each tread being as wide as a city street and each of the separate steel plates that make them up a yard across. Mr. Garin put Seth down, and they climbed up the ladder to Mo's treads. I climbed up behind them, hoping like mad nobody would fall. If they did, I was the one who'd most likely be on the hook in case of a lawsuit. June Garin stood back aways so she could take pictures of us standing up there with our arms around each other, laughing. We were clowning and mugging for the camera and having the time of our lives until the little girl called, “You come back, Seth! Right now! You shouldn't be way over there!”

I couldn't see him because up where I was on Mo's tread, all the rest of the digger was in the way, but I could see his mother just fine, and how scared she looked when she spotted him.

“Seth!”
she yelled.
“You come back now!”
She yelled it two or three times, then dropped her camera on the ground and just
ran
. That was all I needed to see, her
dropping her expensive Nikon like a used cigarette pack. I was back down the ladder in about three jumps, Wonder I didn't fall off and break my neck. Even more of a wonder Garin or his older boy didn't, I suppose, but I never even thought about that at the time. Never thought about them at all, tell the truth.

The little boy was already climbing the slope to the opening of the old mine, which was only about twenty feet up from the pit floor. I saw that and knew his mother wasn't ever going to catch him before he got inside. Wasn't anyone going to catch him before he got inside, if that was what he meant to do. My heart wanted to sink into my boots, but I didn't let it. I got running as fast as I could, instead.

I overtook Mrs. Garin just as Seth reached the mine entrance. He stopped there for a second, and I hoped maybe he
wasn't
going to go in. I thought there was a chance that if the dark didn't put him off, the smell of the place would—kind of an old campfire smell, like ashes and burned coffee and scraps of old meat all mixed together. Then he
did
go in, and without so much as a look back at me yelling for him to quit it.

I told his Mom to stay clear, for God's sake, that I'd go in and bring him out. I
told her to tell her son and husband the same thing, but of course Garin didn't listen. I don't think I would have, in his situation, either.

I climbed the slope and broke through the yellow tapes. The tyke was short enough so he'd been able to go right underneath. I could hear the faint roaring you almost always hear coming out of old mine-shafts. It sounds like the wind, or a far-off waterfall. I don't know what it really is, but I don't like it, never have. I don't know anyone who does. It's a ghostly sound.

That day, though, I heard another one I liked even less—a low, whispery squealing. I hadn't heard it any of the other times I'd been up to look into the shaft since it was uncovered, but I knew what it was right away—hornfels and rhyolite rubbing together. It's like the ground is talking. That sound always made the miners clear out in the olden days, because it meant the works could come down at any time. I guess the Chinamen who worked the Rattlesnake back in 1858 either didn't know what that sound meant or weren't allowed to heed it.