Skinny-Dipping at Monster Lake (16 page)

The dads were worse than us kids when it came to watching the wrecker. Not even bothering to put their slacks on, they trotted up the hill. The guy in the wrecker said he was afraid to drag the truck out because it might bend the driveshaft. Then he aimed his flashlight down into the trench
and looked underneath the EMS truck.

“Already bent,” he announced. “Might as well drag 'er out of there.”

Only his truck wasn't strong enough, so he had to call for a second wrecker to come and help. By the time they were done, it was almost light enough to see without the generator. There had been so much going on, I didn't even feel like I'd been up all night. I wasn't the least bit sleepy or tired.

Now that all the excitement was over, the men helped us break camp and load our things to take home. We'd try the all-night fishing trip another time. Mr. Aikman told Ted and me to go check the bank poles.

“Not right to leave fish dangling on a hook,” he said. “Any worth keeping, we'll clean. Otherwise, make sure all the bait is off and the hooks are tied so they won't snag anything.”

When we got back, most everybody had gone. Greg, Dad, and Mr. Aikman were still there, gathering up our ropes.

“We'll put these back in the garage,” Dad said. “Then we'll have Greg drive us home. Soon as I take a shower, we'll go check on your mom and Mrs. Baum. Kent, you want to grab that last rope over there?”

Beside the dirt-covered ball of roots at the base of the big cottonwood, I picked up the rope and started wrapping it around my arm.

A little orange sliver of the morning sun peeked above the oak trees on the back side of Mrs. Baum's house. If I hadn't been standing right there at that very instant—if I hadn't bent over to pick up the rope, just when I did—I would have never seen it.

A bright flash. Less than an inch around. It glistened and sparkled at me from the dirt. Hit me smack in the eye.

D
ad and I both took showers. He had me go first so he could shave. When we finished and dressed, we dropped Greg off at the fire department. Then Dad and I drove to the hospital to check on Mom and Mrs. Baum.

We could hear Mrs. Baum's fussing before we even opened the door to her room. “Isn't this just like a hospital. Doctor
finally
says it's okay to go home, then you sit around and wait for three hours. Takes them forever to get the paperwork done. If I had any sense, I'd just up and march out of this place and let them hunt for me. I'd just . . .”

Dad shoved the door open and walked in. Mrs. Baum sat in a wheelchair beside the hospital bed. Mom was in a straight-back chair beside her.

“Hi, Emma,” Dad greeted. “How you feeling?”

“Oh”—she smiled—“I'm fine. Told that fool doctor there wasn't nothing wrong with me. Young whippersnapper still made me sit here for three hours. Said he wanted to watch me.” She shook her head. “Don't know what he was watching. All
I was doing was sittin' here, waitin' to go home.”

Mom smiled and shot Dad a quick wink. Mrs. Baum kind of leaned to the side so she could see who was following Dad into her room. When she spotted me, a smile lit up her wrinkled old face.

“Hello, Kent. Your mom says you and Jordan were the ones who found me. Saved my life. I almost made it back to the dock, when
whack.
That old tree pounced on me and pinned me to the bottom. I surely do appreciate you and those other boys. I'd still be sittin' in that submersible if it hadn't been for you.”

“Talking about the sub . . .” Dad sat on the edge of the bed. “Where in the world did that thing come from? And why were you in it? And . . .”

• • •

It was at least another hour before the nurses came and finally told Mrs. Baum she could go home. After an hour of talking and answering questions—that, plus the drive home—I learned a whole bunch about Mrs. Baum and the submarine and mining.

Mr. Baum was a miner. I remembered her telling us that, the day Mom made me go with her for a visit. But I always figured he was a coal miner. Only Mr. Baum wasn't really a miner. He was what they called a troubleshooter—a guy who solved
problems they had with mine-shaft construction, poisonous gas, or flooding. He must have been good at it, too, because he worked for a number of big mining companies all the way from California and Nevada to Alaska. They weren't coal mines, either. They were gold mines.

About a year before he was to retire, one of the big mines in British Columbia, Canada, started flooding. The geologists decided it was from a nearby lake and called Mr. Baum in.

The mining company bought the submarine from the Canadian government. They got it for practically nothing. That's because it was an experimental two-man sub. Trouble was, with two people in it, a gas-operated engine, and oxygen to breathe, they could only carry enough gasoline to stay down for about fifteen minutes. They were getting ready to turn the thing into scrap and start over again when the mining company bought it.

Mr. Baum took out the gas tank and motor and replaced it with a smaller electric engine. The marine batteries could go for twelve to twenty-two hours without being recharged. Making it a one-man sub instead of two, left room for enough compressed air to stay down for eight hours or more.

After Mr. Baum found where the mine shaft was
leaking and showed them how to repair it, he asked if he could have the sub.

• • •

“But why?” Mom asked as we drove across the dam. Mrs. Baum rode shotgun, next to Dad in the front seat. She turned a bit so she could see Mom and smiled.

“As soon as we get to the house, I'll show you.”

Even from behind her, I could see her stiffen when we turned off the road and into our driveway, instead of taking her straight home.

“Why are we stopping?”

“Kent found something you might like to have,” Dad said. “He'll hurry.”

I leaped out of the car, and Dad tossed me the keys. Once inside, I turned off the alarm, grabbed my backpack, and raced to the car.

“What's in the pack?” Mrs. Baum asked.

“I want to see what you're going to show us, first,” I said.

We heard the table saw as soon as Dad pulled into her driveway and turned off the engine. Mrs. Baum hopped out and toddled around to the front of her house to see what was going on. We followed her.

Ted and his dad were just putting the finishing touches on the door frame. The new door leaned against the wall.

“Rowdy, what are you doing?”

Mr. Aikman explained about busting the door open the night before, when she didn't answer. He said that since he was the one who broke it, he thought he should replace it. Mrs. Baum told him the thing was old and about halfway rotted, anyway, and that she intended to pay for the door and his time.

I guess they would have argued, back and forth, for the rest of the day if I hadn't stepped between them.

“Mrs. Baum?” I said politely. “Wasn't there something you were going to show us?”

She blinked. “Oh, yeah. Come on in the house.”

“Can Ted come, too?”

She shrugged. “Might as well. I promised my husband, Jeb, that I would keep it a secret. After last night everyone's seen the submarine. Ain't a secret if the whole country knows about it. Come on.”

We all followed her through the house and into her kitchen. Mrs. Baum opened the freezer and dug around inside. “Sorry I don't have any pie or cake to offer,” she said over her shoulder. “If you boys will drop by this afternoon or tomorrow, I'll have some chocolate chip cookies baked up for you. Y'all take a seat. Make yourselves comfortable.”

We sat in the chairs around the kitchen table. Mrs. Baum set a tin container full of flour on the counter.

“She going to fix the cookies
now
?” I whispered.

Ted shrugged. Mom shushed me.

Mrs. Baum dug deeper into the freezer and pulled out another tin. Then she got a bowl from the shelf and carefully dumped that container into it. It didn't sound like flour when it hit the metal bowl. I could hear it
clink
and
clunk.
Then she started digging through it with her hand, pulling something out of the flour.

“My father found these, down in the Bottom, just about the time they were finishing construction on the lake dam. Family farm was six hundred and forty acres. Went from the eighty up behind the house, down across the valley, and halfway up the Point. County bought the front part of the place for the lake. Dad had more or less retired from dairy farming and didn't need the land. But the farm had been in the family since his grandfather homesteaded the place.

“Guess Dad was taking one more look at that part of the old farm before the lake covered it up. That's when he stumbled on to this.”

She turned on the faucet and started rinsing whatever it was she'd dug out of the flour. When
she was done, Mrs. Baum turned around and handed each one of us a piece of shiny rock.

The one she gave me was about the size of Dad's thumb. Mom held one that filled her whole hand. I looked at mine. Twisted it between my fingers. It was bright and sparkly, like light bouncing off ripples on the lake.

Mr. Aikman gasped. “Silver.”

“Your dad found a silver mine?” Mom asked.

Mrs. Baum shook her head. “That's what Dad thought. He put a little piece of it in a box and mailed it to us while we were in Alaska. Jeb knew what it was right off, but he took it in to have the assayer make sure.

“It's platinum. High-grade platinum, at that. What you're looking at isn't even ore. Those are pure platinum nuggets that my father found.”

The grown-ups gasped. I looked at my chunk again. It was pretty, all right. But I still didn't see what all the fuss was about. I leaned over toward Mom.

“What's platinum?” I whispered.

“It's a valuable metal. They use it for jewelry and stuff like that. It's worth a lot of money.”

“More than gold?” I whispered.

Mom looked me square in the eye. When she nodded, I felt my head kind of snap back.

“More than gold.”

M
rs. Baum had Mom help her get some glasses from the cabinet. She had a big pitcher of lemonade in the fridge. Once everyone had something to drink, she went on with her story.

“The mail service was better in those days than it is now,” Mrs. Baum said. “Still took three weeks to get the package. Along with it came a letter saying Dad had been using a pick and shovel, and had already tunneled about four feet into the rock. Said it was starting to look like a real, honest-to-goodness mine. The package and letter got to us on a Friday afternoon, so Jeb had to wait until Monday to get it down to the assay office. As soon as he had the report, he called to have Dad be sure and write down
exact
directions to where he was digging. Only nobody answered the phone when he called.”

Mrs. Baum hesitated, her eyes kind of drifting off to gaze up at the ceiling for a moment, then looked back at us.

“The reason there was no answer . . . that's when
Dad and Al Beckman had their car wreck. Mother was at the hospital. That's why no one answered . . . and . . .” She sort of drifted off again, then cleared her throat. “Anyway, Mother called us that evening, and we hopped a plane the next morning. Got here about two hours before Dad passed away.”

We all sat quiet for a time. Dad handed his piece of rock back to Mrs. Baum.

“So you never knew where he'd found the platinum.”

She shook her head. “The lake was already about three-fourths of the way up the ridge. All Mother could tell us was”—she pointed with a wave of her hand, toward the point—“ ‘I heard him tapping, with that pickax, down yonder.'

“Jeb and I moved here when he retired. Mother needed someone around, but she just didn't have any reason to live without Dad. She passed away the following summer.

“Working around gold mines and gold miners, Jeb knew how greedy people can be. He figured if someone saw a submersible in this part of the country, there would be lots of questions. He also knew there'd be a swarm of people all over that lake looking for the mine. Most of them without the slightest idea what they were doing. Probably end
up getting hurt or getting someone drowned. So he rented a bulldozer and dug the trench before the lake was full. Built the work shed to store and keep the batteries charged and hide the compressor and the air tanks. Bought bridge timbers for the top and put dirt and grass over them to hide it. And spent the next twelve years looking for that mine.”

“That's why you didn't want us riding in front of your house, isn't it?” Ted asked. “Because we might find those bridge timbers.”

Mrs. Baum shook her head. “Not so much that you might find them. I knew those timbers were old. I was afraid a horse might bust through or break a leg. Didn't want any of you boys getting hurt.”

Dad took a long sip of his lemonade and propped his elbows on the table. “Was that what sent him to the nursing home, Emma?” he asked. “Did he get trapped in the sub, like you did, and couldn't get air?”

“No. We always carried a spare mask and scuba tank in the event that something went wrong with the sub. We never had to use it. I had it on, last night, but with that darned tree sittin' on top of me, I couldn't get the hatch open. Did give me enough extra air for you to find me and get me out, though.

“No, Jeb was just fixing his coffee one morning. I heard the crash when he fell and came running. Had a massive stroke. That's what the doctors said. Old age. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

“But why did
you
start taking the sub out, Emma?” Mom asked. “Sounds like it was your husband's job, not yours.”

“I didn't take it out.” She gave a little snort. “I just let it sit in the boathouse. Left the fool contraption there for about eight years. Between Jeb's retirement check and the platinum Dad had stashed, things were fine. Then that darned nursing home . . .” She paused a moment and gave another little snort. “Well, not just
that
nursing home—all of them. They all started going up on their prices. Every two to three months I'd get another letter telling me how much more it was going to cost the following month. What you're holding in your hands is the last of the platinum. When that's gone . . . well, it costs over three thousand dollars a month. Jeb's retirement won't cover it, and the only other thing I can do is start selling off the farm.”