Holland Suggestions (9 page)

“I do have friends there.”

It was a curious thing to say, and I looked at her curiously as I answered her: “I believe you.”

“I guess we could still have some good times.
If
you asked me to go along with you, I mean. That’s not a hint, by the way, but it looks like you’re going to be around, and I’m not in any big hurry anyway.”

“What about California?”

“It’ll still be there.”

That’s what I mean about assumptions. From the start of our little sexual adventure she had assumed that I would want her along and I assumed that she would want to come. In this case both were reasonably correct, so that made things easier. Over breakfast I looked at a road map while she visited the ladies’ room. This time she did not even look at the telephone, which was in plain view across the dining room, and I hoped that the whole nasty business—whatever it meant—was over for her. When the time was right I would ask her about it, and maybe she would have some answers. I still had a lot to find out. The New York phone call was annoying, but nothing could be done on that angle from here; I put it aside and played the hand I had dealt myself. I studied the road map, with particular attention to the area west of Pueblo, and the first thing I noticed was that Route 50 continued on through the Rockies and across Utah. More interesting at the moment was State Highway 96, which ran due west to the mountain range, then curled north and made a rendezvous with Route 50 about a hundred miles farther along. I followed 96 with my finger, looking for the road called 12, which would complete the trio of automatic-writing numbers; but either the map was not detailed enough or Highway 12 wasn’t there. The state road ran a fairly uncomplicated path, curving along the mountains, intersecting 50 and dying at that point. There were a few unmarked roads along the way, thin blue lines on my road map that led to small towns in the mountains, and all of them would be worth checking out. Amy returned and I folded the map and put it away.

We left the smoky town in a rush, heading into the high country. I found 96 an easier driving road than 50; there was no traffic to speak of after Pueblo had been put behind us. The highway straightened and went in a beeline across a broad plain; the foothills rose up ahead and the few clouds broke and drifted away to the south. Amy asked for my road map and I gave it to her, but she put it aside immediately and stared out at the passing landscape. Her light mood of the morning had vanished; in its place had come an uneasiness. Twice I asked her what was wrong, but she brushed it off with a shrug. The road twisted sharply and began to climb; soon we saw snow-covered peaks in the distance, a great expanse of mountains that seemed to stretch north and south forever. I said, “God, look at that,” but she nodded her head only in politeness and not with any interest. I had the feeling that she had seen it all before, so many times that it was old to her, and it was an uncomfortable thought that I couldn’t shake.

It was partly confirmed later, as we passed a federal wilderness area and came upon a mountain development called Sangre de Cristo Estates. The developer operated out of a trailer just off the highway, and his roadside sign was an annoying intrusion into the unlittered drive. But it did bring my attention for the first time to the words
Sangre de Cristo.
The name had a faintly familiar ring and I said it to myself.

“It means “blood of Christ,’ ” Amy said.

“What?”

“Blood of Christ—that’s what it means. These are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.”

“Have you been here before?”

“Sure. I told you I’m from Denver; that’s only about three hours from here. Anyway, I took Spanish in college.
Sangre
means blood. Sangre de Cristo, get it?”

I got it all right, more than she could know. But I swallowed my surprise and said, “Why are the mountains called that?”

“I think the Spanish named them hundreds of years ago. They say the morning sun gives a red tint to the whole range, so the Spanish called them ‘Blood of Christ.’ ”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

Her answer to that was impatient, not quite sharp but getting there: “Oh, hell; look, I read it all somewhere once and it just stuck. Anyway, I told you I’ve been here.”

“Well, have you ever heard of a Route 12 that branches off from this highway?”

She reached for the map.

“It’s not there,” I said.

“Then I guess there isn’t any. If there was, it would be here, wouldn’t it?”

She turned away from me again; I wrote it off as bitchiness and my inability to understand it and make it right. The mountains loomed ahead of us; I knew that these were the real vanguards of the Rockies, and all before them had been mere foothills. From the last of the foothills the road ran across the valley to the mountain base in a slow arc. There were a couple of towns at the bottom, and I stopped for gas and, I hoped, directions to Road 12. Nobody at the gas station had ever heard of it, and Amy took in my repeated queries without a word. I pushed on north, passing a few dirt roads and giving them all the same careful scrutiny. In the end, I thought, I would have to go to the end of 96, then come back slowly and explore each side road. Then I came to one road that was different from the rest. It wasn’t quite a physical difference; just a tantalizing familiarity that had been missing from all the others. There were mailboxes and indications that the road had recently been snowplowed. I did not react well; even as I was passing it by, I jerked the wheel and turned in. The sudden movement startled Amy; she sank back against the seat and glared at me.

The road ran concurrently with the highway for a short distance, then turned west toward the mountain range. Just around that first bend we saw the sign; very old and hand-painted, it said:
GOLD CREEK,
12 mi. I was so elated that I shouted, “This is it!” Amy only sat, stony-faced. Not until the silence between us became strained did she force herself to speak.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

The temptation was very strong to throw it all up to her, all the inconsistencies of her sudden appearance and subsequent behavior, with a few tough questions of my own. But that might do more harm than good. Amy wasn’t stupid; she would know, if she was involved, that she was under some suspicion, so I had lost any element of surprise I might once have had. Anyway, it was hardly likely that she would lose her cool under any circumstances and blurt out all she knew. So I continued in my role of blind dupe, at least for a while longer; I said, “I’m just glad to be alive, Amy,” and started to let it go at that. But that sounded as phony as it was, so I filled in the gaps with some back-home ramblings. I talked about how there wasn’t much country like this, even in western Virginia, but she showed no interest or emotion and my voice trailed off in a half-finished sentence. I checked my odometer reading and pushed ahead. There were still patches of snow on the road, and where the snow had melted off it was washboard. I took it slowly and kept both hands on the wheel. As the road rolled up into the mountains there was more snow, and I could see by the tracks that at least one car had been through here either today or yesterday. The tracks were small and close together, indicating recent use by one of those foreign economy cars, possibly a Volks. The road dipped, cutting into a long canyon, and suddenly there was a rushing stream to our left; a sharp turn and we were climbing above it along the mountain face. Another turn and we dropped into an adjacent canyon. But the drive was surprisingly easy and the road was good. Only once did we get in a tight squeeze, when we met a jeep coming out The jeep was piloted by a bearded man and occupied by three other bearded men. I was vaguely aware that Amy had turned to look at them after we crept past; I tried to focus on them in my rear-view, but there was too much bumping for a clear look. At the bottom of the canyon a wooden bridge crossed the creek; obviously new, it was freshly painted and well maintained. Someone had sanded it, maybe as recently as this morning. On the left bank the road began another slow climb. It was almost a straight climb to the top of the ridge, and from there we could see a long valley with the remains of an old town at the bottom.

It was exactly as I had pictured it. The one road wound down the mountain, through the town, and dead-ended at the stream. I started down and came soon to the worst part of the road, a hole where the melting snow had left a pool of mud. I sloshed through it and we came to a rim just above the town. My odometer showed that we had come almost twelve miles from the highway.

From here the town looked dead. The buildings—even though we could not see all of them yet—looked old and ruined. There were about four square blocks of rotting frame structures and a wider array of buildings, built without any kind of organization, on the other side of the stream. The town had evidently been a mining camp; the rusted remains of crude mining apparatus still clutched the mountainside. Then I saw movement and blinked twice; there were people here. Smoke curled from several of the chimneys across the stream, and as I looked closer I saw some men working on a house.

Amy had seen it all before I had: “It’s a hippie camp.”

“How can you tell that from here?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. And I’ve been in hippie camps before. Didn’t you see those four guys in the jeep? That wasn’t the governor of Colorado driving.”

I put the car in gear and we started down. As we came closer I saw that she was right: The area across the stream had become a haven for bearded men and long-haired girls. Many of the old shacks had been patched and propped; we could see perhaps two dozen people working in the sunlight. Some of the houses across the river seemed to be new; the workmanship often was shoddy but the wood had a still-green freshness. Most were unpainted; a few were wrapped in tar paper.

The road leveled off on a final ridge before dropping the final hundred yards into the town. Here, still somewhat above the town’s rooftop, we came quite suddenly upon an old house. It stood alone, above the town, a giant old mansion of stone and glass perched almost at the edge of that final rim. In its own way the house was as out of place as the makeshift shacks across the river; obviously it had some age behind it, which the shacks did not have, but in no way was it of the same era as the mining town. Its appearance, unexpected and brief from the road, was startling, but heavy underbrush prevented more than a glimpse. In those few seconds I saw that all its windows were covered with either shades or heavy curtains, and a long row of flowerless flower pots lined the front porch. There was scaffolding at the sides and around back, indicating a huge renovating job in progress. The road wound among the trees to a double-door garage behind the house. I blinked and the image disappeared behind the trees and shrubs as my car began its slow descent toward the old buildings of Gold Creek.

Had it been slightly higher in the mountains, the town undoubtedly would have been a ghost. But nestled between great peaks, it was protected from high mountain storms, and the mid-morning temperature was pleasant despite the snow. Large mounds of snow lined both sides of the street, and the street itself had thawed to a sticky mud. But there was virtually no wind, even though I could see snow blowing furiously off the mountaintops in the distance. The lower part of Gold Creek, where the business district must have been in the gold-rush days, was deserted. In the whole of the mining camp I saw only one building with any sign of life: a large frame store of some kind at the end of the main street. It faced me as I drove toward the hippie camp; obviously the main street had dead-ended here, at the junction of the main north-and-south street. Parked outside the store were a jeep, a Volkswagen, and a late-model Buick. The side street ran directly to the stream, where perhaps ten older vehicles were parked. The stream severed the valley here, leaving a crude rope walking bridge, the only apparent access to the hippie camp at the other side.

The store at the end of the main street turned out to be an inn called the Mother Lode, lighted on the inside and apparently open for business. “They’ve got to be kidding,” I said as I stopped the car behind the red Volkswagen. “They can’t possibly do any business in a place like this. Does this place look open to you?”

She nodded. I got out for a better look. This entire block was like a page from the 1880s, but on closer examination I saw that most of the buildings were props: all front and no insides. Someone had taken the trouble to restore this side of the street, right down to the wooden Indian and the candy-stripe barber pole. But it was all show: behind it was nothing but two-by-four braces. It was a dramatic contrast to the opposite side of the street. There the buildings were rotted out and crumbling, just as you might expect to find in any mountain ghost town. A few doors across from the inn was the old theater, obviously the town hotspot during the gold rush. The roof had caved in, filling the interior with light, and I could still make out where the stage and bar had been. Behind the stage were some flimsy rooms, dressing rooms for sure, but the walls had long ago rotted away. Next to the theater was a saloon, sagging and crushed by the snows of ninety years. A tree had grown up through the floor and its branches jutted through a side window. Farther along a side street I saw the crumbling remains of an old corral and something that might have been an outhouse.

I saw something else: the face of the old mansion on the ridge, unprotected from this angle and offering a view even more sinister than I got from the road. I turned away from it and called to Amy.

“Hey, what do you think of this place?”

“Not much, if you want to know the truth.”

“I think it’s fantastic.”

She said something that sounded like “you would,” but by then I had moved away from the car. I shelved the temptation to tell her that, after all, she had invited herself along, and after a time she got out of the car and joined me on the street.

“You just going to stand here all day?”

“No, I think I’ll go inside and see if this inn’s for real.”