Big Maria (30 page)

“This is my fault. I’m sorry.”

Ramón looked at Bernardo. “What is happening? Are we supposed say something? I’m scared.”

“It is nobody’s fault. Although Worky has some explaining to do. Your doings were out of respect for your father. We, out of respect for our mother,” Bernardo said.

“And our burros,” Ramón added.

“It will take more than a bad nature hike to hurt this family.” Bernardo almost smiled, but his face didn’t know how.

“Do you forgive me?”

“You are forgiven,” Bernardo said.

“Yeah,” added Ramón.

Mercedes flinched from something landing on her head. She held out her hand. A fat raindrop landed in the center of her palm.

In seconds, it was pouring rain. Plump drops pounded down in sheets. They opened all their bottles and held out their hats to catch all the water they could. The containers filled up quickly.
The ground turned to muddy clay. When their feet sank above their ankles, they searched for some kind of shelter.

Ramón led the way as they slogged through the mud as quickly as they could. They headed back in the direction of the mountain, hoping for a cave or at least solid ground.

“This could flood really quick,” Mercedes yelled over the torrent.

“Do you see anything?” Bernardo yelled.

“I cannot see past the rain,” Ramón said.

“What is that?” Bernardo asked. But not in time.

Ramón ran directly into a metallic wall. It made a loud gong over the drumming rain. He bounced back and onto the ground with a muddy splash. Bernardo walked to the wall and ran his hand over it, squinting at the chipped metal siding.

“It is a bus. A school bus.”

Not caring why there was an abandoned school bus parked in the middle of the desert, they ran inside. Bernardo swallowed cobwebs as he made his way down the aisle. He swept them to the side and spit them out. Water dripped from his hair and body. Ramón and Mercedes followed, shaking themselves off. Ramón shook some of the mud from his body.

“You two okay?” Mercedes asked.

Bernardo and Ramón nodded. Out of breath and out of ideas, they sat in silence, listening to the plinking of the rain on the metal roof. In other circumstances, it might have been a pleasant sound.

“S
o where is the damn thing?”

Frank stood in the center of the small bowl looking up at the walls of the cliffs. “If the mine is here, if we’re there, where is it?”

The three men didn’t try to escape the rain. They sat it out uncovered for the twenty minutes of its fury. Now soaking wet, they wandered around the strange circular valley with the high canyon walls.

“I don’t know, but it’s here,” Harry said, frustration in his voice. Not the first or even fifth time the question had been asked and answered.

“Shouldn’t there be an opening, a door, maybe a sign? If the mine is here, wouldn’t there be—I don’t know—a mine?”

“This isn’t some riddle, Frank. I’m not screwing with you. It’s old. It’s hidden or buried or something. But according to everything, all my research, all the reading, it’s here. Or around here.”

“Is it here or around here?”

Harry looked up from the damaged GPS unit that he had been attempting to repair and stared at Frank. “How do I explain better than ‘I don’t know’?”

Ricky looked at the walls of the valley, ignoring the two men. He spoke as much to himself as Harry and Frank. “It looks like a crater. Where we’re at. Not like a natural valley, but a crater. Like on the moon.”

Harry and Frank stopped what they were doing and looked at the walls. They craned their necks taking in the circular, crateresque shape of the depression.

Ricky continued. “Maybe this is an old crater, like one that was made billions of years ago, like by the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.”

“Wait a second. You believe in dinosaurs?” Harry asked.

“Sure, who doesn’t?” Ricky said.

“But you can’t believe in both God and dinosaurs,” Harry said.

“Why not?”

Frank broke in. “Considering that we’re standing in a military test range, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this crater was made by a missile of some kind. Which means it wasn’t here when the mine was here. It was made after the mine was abandoned. The Army blew up your goddamn mine, Harry.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Harry threw the GPS unit onto the ground. “When are you going to finally trust me? We made it this far, and I’m still riding the high of being alive. We crossed a minefield, a fake city at war, and an artillery barrage, and we lived. We should’ve died last night, the day before, and the day before that. All of us. But not one of us did. What are the odds? We’ve been tested and tested and tested. This is our ninth life. Not the time to quit. That gold is here and it is ours.

“Maybe a missile made this crater. It’d be like the government to screw us without us knowing it. And maybe the mine entrance was here and now it ain’t. Means the entrance is gone. Don’t mean the mine is gone or the tunnels got filled up. If we’re standing on the mine, then we’re standing on the gold. Mines don’t go side to side, they go down. We want that gold, we dig.”

Frank shrugged and walked away, but that was enough for Ricky. He nodded and pulled a shovel from the burro’s pack.

F
our hours later, the three men were tired beyond the limits of exhaustion and in the worst moods of their lives. Which was
a real milestone, considering that their lives hadn’t exactly been all rainbows and blow jobs to that point.

That’s what four hours of digging hardpack and rock will do. Digging a hole to find another hole and finding nothing. Not even a clue to make more digging seem worth it. Each muscle ache ripped at what little faith each man had left. They had been beaten and battered and had asked for more, but gotten a whole lot of nothing in return.

The artillery started up to the west. Far enough that they were confident that they were at a safe distance, but close enough to make them wince with each explosion. The ground shuddered, and their memories of the night came back with each strike.

The interior of the crater was roughly fifty yards in diameter. Each man picked a spot and dug. After an arbitrary depth, the digger moved on and tried another random spot. After four hours, the area looked like a battle zone, foxholes spotting the landscape. The burro watched curiously, sniffing between holes for anything edible. It licked at pebbles but let them fall off its tongue.

Frank had stopped digging an hour earlier. He lay on his back in the bottom of one of the holes. The damp soil felt good, but he couldn’t help feel like he was lying in a grave. Even through the exhaustion, it was hard to be at ease when someone could cover you with dirt at any moment. When he saw Ricky standing over him, his heart skipped a beat.

“Jesus, Ricky.”

“Didn’t mean to scare you. Had to talk. What’re we doing here? We going to keep digging until we can’t dig no more?”

“I’m already there. I got the heart to dig, but not the heart.”

“You need water.”

Ricky handed Frank a canteen. He glanced over to Harry, who was digging feverishly. His form was awful, but his frantic enthusiasm made up for it. He dug like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon ran.

After Frank took a drink, he said, “Harry believes that as long as he keeps forward, he’ll reach the finish line. But everything isn’t always in front of us. You can only pound your head into the same wall so many times. Sometimes forward ain’t nothing but an empty hole.”

Ricky shrugged. “We made it here. It feels really close, you know?”

“You’re right. Don’t listen to me. What do we got to lose? I’m just tired, kid. Don’t mean to be the voice of shit.”

“I’ve been praying. We’ll find that gold.”

“You prayed for gold. What does God think about that?”

“I prayed for my family. The gold is part of that.”

“A small part.”

“Hey!” It was Harry.

Ricky turned and Frank sat up, peeking over the edge of his hole. Harry’s head and shoulders were visible from the top of the four-foot-deep hole on the other end. He was waving frantically.

“I think I found something. The ground is different here. Like the soil’s darker or—it’s just different.”

The burro wandered near Harry, sniffing and kicking at the pebbles near the hole.

“Might be nothing.”

Then the burro disappeared. Ricky had been watching the burro as it walked by Harry, and then it was gone. In a cloud of dust. Poof. Running it back in his mind, the animal hadn’t so much disappeared as dropped. Like the ground swallowed it up.

The three men stared in silence at the spot where the burro had been. The only sound, pebbles and rocks clacking together. And then a thud and a loud bray.

Harry turned to Ricky and gave him the saddest look Ricky had ever seen. “That’s not good,” Harry said.

And then he disappeared, too.

A
ll Harry could see was nothing. Darkness surrounded him. He hadn’t lost consciousness, but the blackness didn’t quite convince him that he was awake either. The fall had been a jolt of intense confusion that felt like he had been spit into outer space. For a terrifying couple of seconds, he thought he was blind. The relief was monumental when he finally looked up and saw the light from the holes thirty feet above him. The holes that he and the burro had fallen through.

The walls of the pit had slowed his drop as he careened down the narrow channel. His landing had been unexpectedly soft. It hurt, but he had been surprised at the amount of give. There was an advantage to a life of misery, at least when it came to pain. He had absorbed worse many times before.

It took him a minute to gather that he had landed on top of the burro, the animal breaking the majority of his fall. Harry’s still-healing leg stung from where his heel had hit the hard surface of wherever the hell he was. That leg was never going to heal right.

A voice shouted from above. “Harry!” It was Ricky. “You okay?”

The kid sounded frantic. But Harry would probably be a little freaked too if someone just disappeared. Someone and a burro. Standing there all lah-di-dah, then like a crummy magic trick, presto and gone.

Harry saw the silhouette of Ricky’s head above him. It made the opening look like a cartoon eye.

“I’m alive,” Harry yelled through some pain. “Better be careful. Else you’ll be down here with me.”

“You hurt?”

“Don’t fall in, kid. Seriously. You’ll land on me.”

“I’m on my belly. Frank’s got hold of my foot. It feels stable where I’m at. You hit like a tunnel that was covered up.”

Frank laughed. “I always get the shaft.”

“I’ll take it from the lame joke that you’re okay.”

“I don’t feel too hurt. Unless it’s one of those internal spleenrelated injuries that kills you two days later.”

He pressed a hand against the belly of the burro, pushing himself up to see how well he moved. He stopped and held his hand against the coarse hair, feeling its stillness. “Think the donkey’s dead. I don’t hear or feel no breathing. I landed on him. He’s warm. If he ain’t dead, he’s super messed up.”

“There should be a flashlight in its pack. Or a lantern, if it ain’t got broke. Maybe, hopefully some rope.”

Harry rolled onto his stomach and climbed the side of the donkey, feeling for the heavy bundles. He ran his fingers over the animal’s body, trying to figure front from back and top from bottom. His hand finally found the canvas of the pack and dug inside. He dug through clothes, candy bars, and Abraham Constance’s head. Eventually his fingers wrapped around the familiar cylinder of a flashlight.

The light hurt his eyes, and the first thing Harry saw was the twisted neck and grotesque expression of the poor, definitely dead burro. An unexpectedly high-pitched noise leaped from Harry’s mouth. He had a new image for his nightmares. The burro’s tongue sagged between its blocky teeth. The animal’s eyes stared glassy and empty and sad.

Harry pointed the light in the other direction.

“What do you see?” Ricky asked.

Harry broke out laughing. “I told you I’d find the mine. Harry Schmittberger delivers.”

“W
e really found it,” Ricky said through a laugh of his own.

“The mine, not the gold.” Frank didn’t mean to be negative, but he was tired and felt like hell. His skin crawled in an odd way and his hands buzzed. He was ready for a bed and a shower and a meal.

The two of them sat in the shade with their backs to the wall of the crater. They both stared at the hole. The sun had dipped lower in the sky, the cooling air pleasant.

“Every step, we get closer,” Ricky said. “Don’t matter the next screwed-up thing that happens.”

“But there’s always something. Notice that. We’re at the mine, for all the good it does. We can’t get down there. Harry can’t get up. The burros are dead. Even if we find the gold, how are we going to carry it?”

“Just another obstacle. I don’t know how to get down there or get Harry up. That’s a tricky one, but we’ll figure it out. The supplies are in the burro’s pack. Most of the water and food, too. We don’t figure it, we’re as screwed as Harry. I tried having him throw supplies up, but it’s too far for him. The guy’s got an arm like a girl. He couldn’t get a water bottle even halfway. He’s got the rope, too.” Ricky stood and paced.

“Maybe the tunnels, the mine shafts lead to a way out,” Frank said.

“Harry wandering in the dark? Last thing we need is for him to get lost. Or hurt. How stable is the rest of the mine, right?”

Frank stared at his shoes, smiled, and asked, “How far down is it, did you say?”

“I don’t know. About twenty-five feet. Maybe a little more.”

“I got an idea. Hope you’re not shy.”

P
ain shot up Harry’s leg. He put more weight on it. Harry wasn’t going to let something as ordinary as a not-quite-healed broken leg stop him. His curiosity and greed drove him
forward. It wasn’t about getting out of the mine. It was about finding the gold. If he found it and died, at least he’d end on a victory. The next sucker would find his smiling skeleton guarding the hidden treasure. Although, how can you tell if a skeleton is smiling?