And the Hills Opened Up (4 page)

Elwood grimaced—his brother’s breath was as foul as if he’d been chewing on a dead buzzard for the past hour.

“Don’t know about greatest,” Caleb said, setting a cup of coffee in front of Owen.  “About the fanciest concoction I can make is pink gin.”

Owen frowned, looking at his coffee.  Caleb filled a mug of beer from a keg under the bar and set it in front of Hayes, who tipped it toward the bartender in salute before drinking.  Stubbs ordered a beer and a whiskey and Elwood turned to Roach Clayton while the bartender was occupied.

“You see anything strange about them guards?”

Roach shook his head and stared into the bar’s varnished top.  “Two went upstairs with a girl each, the rest is playing poker.  They’ve been drinking beer and whiskey steady but don’t seem bent on getting wild.”

“They laugh like goddamn donkeys,” Johnny said, leaning across Roach and only bothering to half-whisper.  “Bunch of asses, is what they are.”

Elwood stared into Johnny’s eyes a moment, pondering the glassy rage he saw inside them.  Miller wasn’t built for the thieving life—he should have been out fighting in a war somewhere, riding on the front lines, charging up hills and such.  The only stealth and cunning he had to him was the shrewdness of a cornered animal, already wounded and ready to die fighting.

“You said only two went with the girls, Roach?”

“I did.”

“But I counted six on the road.  Four riders, one driver, one lookout.”

“Lookout’s not here,” Roach said, and sipped at his beer.  “I’m thinking he’s over at the Dennison man’s place, having dinner or whatnot while they count the money delivered.”

Elwood thought about this, imagining the two men talking quietly over fat beef steaks.  Their shirtsleeves would be rolled.  The house would be cool and padded with fine oriental carpets.  Heavy furniture.

“The Cooke House looks like a tough nut to crack.  Thick stone walls with hardly a weak point to it.”

Roach nodded and belched.  Hayes turned to his brother, who was still frowning at his coffee cup.

“You didn’t say nothing about a stone fort, Owen.”

“I don’t want coffee, Elwood.  I want a beer, like you got.”

“How’d you reckon we’d get at that cashbox if it’s surrounded like that?”

“Figured you’d have your ways,” Owen said, smiling as he looked up at the high ceiling.  “What’s a few stones to a famous bandit like Elwood Hayes?”

Hayes took a breath and finished his beer.  He felt like cuffing his younger brother on the ears, but it would draw too much attention.  He’d have to wait and cuff him later, when they were counting all their money.

Owen sniffed and picked up his coffee, smelling it like an animal expecting poison.  “No, El, I suppose I never really thought that far, to be honest,” he admitted.  “I didn’t think you’d actually show up as such, ready for business.  How long’s it been since we seen each other?”

“Since Gran died, I reckon.”

“Four years, that’d be.  Four years, Elwood.”

Elwood’s gaze fell on the bartender, who was whittling on a block of wood.  The shavings curled from his knife and drifted to the floor like snowflakes.

“Four years is a long time to be without kin, ain’t it?”

“Yup,” Elwood said.  “But we’re here together now, ain’t we?”

“Sure.  Sure we are.”

Elwood set his empty mug on the bar, hoping this would be the last of family talk.  Caleb came over and poured him another beer, which tasted almost as good as the first.  Behind them, at the tables, the stagecoach guards laughed and cussed at each other, their voices growing louder.  A chair scraped on the floor as one of the guards got to his feet.  Leaning back on his stool, Elwood watched the man approach the bar from the corner of his eye and saddle up beside Johnny Miller.  The guard had two empty mugs in one fist and one in the other.  He pounded all three against the bar.

“More beer, tender!  More beer!”

Caleb set his whittling aside and filled the mugs without comment.  The guard reached into his pocket and smacked a palm full of coins onto the counter, causing both the bartender and Johnny to flinch.  On Elwood’s right, Owen laughed and raised his coffee cup in salute.

“The man knows what he wants, doesn’t he?”

“Damn right, I do,” the guard said, looking down the bar.  “You fellers prospecting around here?”

“Something like that,” Roach said.  Elwood glanced back at the tables, where the other guards were making a show of not watching. 

“Don’t look much like rock moles,” the guard said.  “Usually y’all are covered with so much grime you can barely make out your eyes.” 

The guard smiled, but nobody laughed.  He collected the filled mugs and lifted them off the bar.  His heavier right hand wavered for a moment, tipping one of the mugs and spilling beer on Johnny Miller’s knee.  The young man sprang up from his stool and pulled out his pistol, leveling it directly at the guard’s chest.  Miller moved so swiftly Elwood only had time to open his mouth and inhale a burst of gunpowder before the stagecoach guard dropped to the floor, beer and all.

6

Old Tol Gregerson, who had a touch of firebug in him, had used more dynamite than he ought’ve and blown the newest section of the Dennison mine all to hell, leaving the third level’s north corner a mess of heaped rock and pooled water. 

But Tol was nowhere to be seen now, of course, Hans Berg noticed as he shoveled stone into an ore car, one of six strung behind a patient mule and his drowsing skinner.  The old man always seemed to be absent when the time came to put rock in the box—Tol Gregerson liked to make the hills go boom but wasn’t as eager to pick up his mess after.

Two other swampers, Jake Keller and Bear Tollackson, worked alongside Berg at the foot of the freshly opened chamber, filling the cars with sediment and raw ore as they slowly opened the room.  Their shared excitement from earlier in the day, when they’d gotten to break and watch the big thump from outside the mine, had worn off four or five ore trains back.  Conversation, which had started loud and rowdy as they started in on the freshly loosened rock, had fallen off to the occasional observation as the hours passed and the rubble showed no signs of letting up.  It always made you feel low when you realized how much mountain you had left, no matter how much you’d dug out already or how badly your back ached. 

“We’ll have work for a month or more at this end,” Jake Keller announced, dumping another shovelful into the cars.  “No need to worry about getting paid.”

“It’s not pay that worries me,” Bear Tollackson said.  “Did you boys see how Chambers sweated before the blasting?  Reminded me of the yellow fever.”

Hans Berg dumped out a shovelful and paused. 

“You’ve seen the Yellow Jack, Bear?”

“Aye.  I worked a silver mine in Argentina, some ten years back.  A hellish place, that was.  Men dropping on both sides of you while shifts went day and night, sometimes running sixteen, eighteen hours a man.”

Hans Berg imagined a mine buried deep beneath layers of teeming jungle and snakes.  The only mine he’d known beside the Red Earth had been back in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  He’d worked the Quincy Mine in Copper Country for five long years before getting soaked one night and showing up for work too drunk and accidently crushing another miner’s knee with a misplaced strike.

And now here he was, a year later and fourteen hundred miles distant, still trying to forget the man’s screams.

“Mr. Chambers is a hard one,” Jake Keller said.  “Fever won’t keep a stubborn fella like that down for long.”

The other men grunted in agreement.  The foreman could be ornery at times but he was easily the finest man any of them had ever worked for.  Hank Chambers begrudged no man his lunch break, his drink, or his pay, long as he worked hard and steady and caused no foolish accident.  With him there were no unnecessary words, no skull knocking, no blustering to show how rough he could make it for the rest of them.  He expected you to work as hard as he did and even the orneriest miners couldn’t bellyache about that.

They topped off the line of ore cars and woke the skinner, a kindly old coot who must have been seventy if he was a day.  The skinner cracked his whip over his mule’s head, passing on the message, and soon the entire train was rolling into the tunnel and out of sight.  Hans imagined the ore train rolling out of their tunnel and switching onto the main track, which would lead to the third level’s adit entrance, where the ore would be sifted out from the dirt and rock and dumped into a haul wagon.  When the wagon was filled, it’d be sent on its way up the mountain road toward Rawlins, where it’d be processed into proper copper at a smelting plant, a foul inferno also owned and operated by Mr. Dennison. 

“Must be near six,” Bear Tollackson said, leaning his ample frame against his shovel’s handle.  They all rested upon their shovels now, breathing heavily as they sweated in the cool air.  By the waxy yellow glow of candlelight, they looked like dirty ghosts exhausted by their ghostly labors. 

“I hope so,” Jake said, wiping his brow with a piece of burlap.  “I could use a few pints at the Runoff, sooner rather than later.  And some beef stew over at the Copper, as well.  Three bowls, I’ll handle.”

A light appeared down the tunnel running from the room, appearing in the same spot where the mule-drawn ore train had disappeared.  The light hovered in the darkness like a moth, swinging slowly back and fourth and illuminating the tunnel’s azurite-spotted walls as it approached. 

A face appeared beside the light—Andrew Klieg, shift boss and second-in-command.  He stepped out of the tunnel’s mouth and entered the high-ceilinged chamber.

“Bear, I need your crew up on Level One to help carry out a heavy fragment.  You can leave this heap till tomorrow.”

“Sure enough, Mr. Klieg.  We’ll head up.”

The shift boss nodded and turned back down the track.  They gathered their tools and followed the shift boss at a distance, letting Klieg gain on them.  Halfway down the tunnel, Hans noticed he’d left his candle behind in the new room. 

“Forgot my light,” Hans called out, causing the other men to chuckle and glance back at him.  “I’ll catch up.”

Bear waved him down the tunnel, his eyes twinkling.  He liked to call Hans “Forgetful Freddy” and this would only add fuel to the fire. 

But heck. 

You needed light to see.

The rooms of the Red Earth Mine felt cold and unfriendly if you happened to find yourself alone in one, your flickering candle raised before you.  The walls of the Quincy Mine, back in Michigan, had seemed only quiet and worn, like an old man wanting nothing more than to be left to his dreamless sleep.  Those extensive, productive shaft mines had been worked for nearly forty years before Hans Berg had arrived to add his shoulder to the load—here, the Red Earth Mine was only two years old, still a fresh burrow inside the heart of Flannery Peak.  The mountain had not yet had time to fully understand that it had been invaded, that men had appeared in this remote part of the world bent on plundering its core, yet Hans could tell it was unhappy nonetheless, like a lion with a thorn in its paw.

So, when the newly blasted chamber’s ceiling split apart ten feet ahead of him, Hans Berg fully expected the entire mountain to collapse upon his trespasser’s head and crush him where he stood, exacting a swift and furious revenge.  Instead, it merely dumped a fresh pile of rock along the tracks, scaring the water out of him.  “Jaspers,” Hans whispered, lifting his candle to better view the pile of rock and scree.  A cloud rose above the fallen rock, thick with dirt, and the familiar smell of smoke filled the air. 

Hans blinked from the dust and examined the hole in the tunnel’s roof.  The light of his candle only reached so far—he could make out nothing except a patch of black overhead, though he might have felt a faint gust of air, coming from somewhere.  He turned his attention back to the pile of newly fallen rock, which looked about the same as all the other turquoise-spotted rubble they’d extracted from the room so far. 

Except….

Something was buried under this rubble. 

Something big. 

“Sweet Mary,” Hans whispered, setting down his candle to free his hands.  He dug off the loose rock and flung the larger stones behind him.  The rocks fell away and gave up the shape below—it was a man with skin so badly charred it encased him like a mummy’s wrap, as if he’d been dipped in a volcano and left out to cool.  But it was a man, all right—some poor son-of-a-bitch who might have been buried inside the mountain for the past thousand years. 

A burnt man, who still smelled like smoke and had curled, claw-like fingers.  Hans Berg wiped his brow, his eyes wide from the sight before him.  The smell of roasted flesh filled the chamber, thickening.  Hans laughed aloud, imagining the reception he’d get back in town—the many drinks the other men would buy him, the fawning attention of the Runoff’s whores—and leaned over to get a closer look at his prize. 

The burnt man’s eyelids parted, showing eyes with no light to them.  Then, quick as that, the burnt man was sitting up and reaching out with his spindly arms, his clawed fingers squeezing Hans’ windpipe with a grip so crushing and fierce it felt like an ache.  The miner’s vision filled with floating spots as he thrashed about, trying to free himself. 

The spots spread into dark and widening pools, then into darkness all around. 

Hans barely had time to wonder about any of it.