Where Echoes Live (6 page)

“Take it easy, Lily.”

She frowned, clearly surprised that I knew her name. Then she rolled her eyes in exasperation, reached down, and shut off the engine. In the sudden quiet, the gush of water from the aluminum trough was very loud.

“What the hell do you want?” Nickles demanded.

“To talk about what you told Hy Ripinsky you saw up at the Transpacific mine site.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That fuckin' tree hugger sent you?”

“Right.” I told her my name and that I was associated with the Coalition.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You were there yesterday—at the trailer.”

“Yes.” I waded over to her, pointed at the machine on the inner tube. “What's that?”

“Hydraulic concentrator. Works like a dredge.”

“And does what?”

“Sucks up gravel and sorts it.”

“Why?”

She glared at me. “You don't know anything, do you? Must be one of those city tree huggers. Why do you think it sorts it? For gold. Gold's heavy, heaviest metal you're likely to find; it sinks and gets trapped in the hopper. The rest gets washed out again.”

“I thought you panned for gold.”

“Panning's for sampling, helps you read the stream, see which gravel bars're worth working. Or it's for weekend prospectors—assholes, most of them. This baby”—she patted the concentrator—“it can process fifty times the material in a single day, plus I can haul it around on my back.”

Nickles was still eyeing me narrowly, a disagreeable twist to her dry cracked lips. But something in her tone told me she was secretly pleased at an opportunity to show off her expertise. I said, “You're a high-tech miner, then.”

“No,
they're
high-tech.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the eastern mesa. “Me, I'm just lucky I scored enough nuggets last year so I could afford this baby.”

“Can we talk about them?” I nodded in the direction that she'd mentioned.

She hesitated, then said, “Ah, what the hell? I can use a break. You want a beer?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Nickles seized the plastic line that anchored the inner tube to a rock and gently towed the concentrator to shore. I helped her boost it onto the high bank, and then she gave me a hand up. “Sit down over there,” she told me, motioning at the sleeping-elephant rock. “And get into the shade—the sun's a killer today.”

While I picked my way through the boulder field, Nickles squatted down, pulled on another plastic line, and fished a six-pack of Coors from the stream. She broke out two cans and lowered the rest back into the water. When she came over and handed one to me, I thought of how the fervent liberals at All Souls would cringe to see me drinking a brand they boycotted. Well, the fervent liberals had never been in Stone Valley in the blistering early afternoon heat…

Nickles and I sat on a flat slab of granite at the base of the elephant, our backs against its cool flank. The shade was welcome, the icy beer more so. I drank deeply, then said, “First off, the Coalition people tell me you never heard of Franklin Tarbeaux, the man who sold the seven hundred acres to Transpacific.”

She swigged beer and shook her head. “Name like that I'd remember. Plus the guy's got to be loaded now; sure as shit I'd make it my business to get to know him.”

“Were you aware that the land on the eastern side of the mesa belonged to a private individual?”

“Well, no, I wasn't
aware
that any
private individual
had got his hands on it—or even that it was being mined.” Her voice mimicked mine, but she smiled to take the sting out of it. “I thought it was BLM land, like most of it around here.”

“And the missing prospector, Earl Hopwood—”

“Who says he's missing?”

“Hy Ripinsky says no one's seen him for over two weeks.”

“So? Knowing Earl, I'd say he's over in Reno or Carson City, shacked up with some whore and losing all his profit from that land deal at the blackjack tables.”

“Does he disappear like that often?”

“Often enough. Earl's sixty-nine years old, but he's still randy as a billy goat. Except for me—and I wouldn't let that old bag of bones touch me if his pole was ten feet long— there's nobody around here for him to get randy
with.”

“But would he take off for two weeks?”

“If he was flush enough—and he had to be, after selling that land.”

It was possible, I supposed, that Hopwood had simply gone off on a spree, but I still intended to take a look around his claim. “Hopwood is a descendant of the people who originally owned the Promiseville mine?”

She nodded. “Family came over here from England or some such goddamn place in the mid-eighteen hundreds, staked their claim, got rich.” Nickles's eyes became surprisingly soft and dreamy. “The house I live in—it was theirs. Nothing fancy the way we think today, but it still looks down on the whole valley….

“That's why I picked it,” she added after a moment. “For luck. Figured if I lived in the rich folks' house, maybe one of these days I'd get rich, too.”

The woman interested me, so I deviated from my line of questioning. “What about you, Lily? How'd you come to be a prospector?”

She finished her beer, crumpled the can, and pitched it toward the stream. It landed on the bank with a faint ping. “Wasn't much else I could do; didn't have much schooling. My mama, she was a dealer at one of the crummy casinos over in Reno. Never knew my dad. We lived with my grandparents, and they was always on me—stick to your schooling, get a good job, marry a nice fellow who'll take care of you.” She grinned wickedly. “Trouble was, I liked to party too much.

“I was just in the eighth grade when I hooked up with this guy who was working the Strip, trying to get a stake together for his prospecting gear. We took off for the Mother Lode, found a lot of gold around Jamestown, even ran our own bar for a while. Had a couple of kids, too.”

After a long pause she continued softly, “He's dead, years now. I don't want to talk about that. My kids—I don't know. The county welfare took them away from me.” Her eyes misted, and she swiped angrily at them. “Why the hell am I telling you all this, anyway?”

I shrugged, drained my beer can. “Maybe it's this place— Stone Valley, Promiseville. It makes you lonely for someone to talk to.”

“It's lonesome, yeah. Nights, it's so quiet out here, it near drives me crazy. I sit on my porch and look out, and you know what I see? That cemetery. It's full of people whose dreams all died. Some nights the only thing I can think of is those people who came to get rich and never got nothing but a pine coffin. And I worry that someday that might be me.”

“But you don't leave.”

“I got no place to go. No place I want to be, now.” She bit her lip, looked away from me.

I sensed she'd had all she could handle of this kind of talk, so I said, “Tell me about what you saw at the mine site.”

Nickles had slumped against the rock. Now she sat up straighter, shook her head as if to clear it. “Up there,” she said. “Well, I'd been wondering for a while, on account of there was nothing going on. No big trucks on the access road, no blasting, nothing that told me they was taking core samples. So I thought I'd go up and have a look….”

That had been two days ago. She'd climbed the mesa at first light, taking a circuitous route from the north, where the granite was fractured into large outcroppings that provided cover. She wasn't sure why she felt compelled to stay hidden, but some instinct had told her it was a good idea.

“Turned out I was right, too,” she said.

The sun had just cleared the far mountains of Nevada that morning. In its spreading light she saw that the land had been freshly graded and terraced on the side of the mesa that faced away from town. The property appeared to be completely surrounded by a high electrified chain-link fence. Four trailers stood near the gate to the access road, and several vehicles were parked near them.

Nickles “slithered snakelike” to a good vantage point and used her binoculars to study the property. There was no evidence of the workings of the old mine, nor did she see any equipment to suggest sampling had begun. As she watched, a man came out of one of the trailers and walked to a shed next to the gate. He called to someone inside, and another man came out and went to the trailer.

“That's when I realized they had guards on the land,” she said. “Why did they need to guard it when there wasn't nothing there? I decided I better find out.”

She'd also decided the direct approach was best, so she started around to the access road, keeping an eye on what went on at the guard station. “I figured I could wander up there and act real neighborly. Say something like ‘I was just out for a stroll and thought I'd stop in and see what a real mining operation's all about.' Only when I got closer I saw that the guy on the gate had a big Magnum on his hip, and a high-powered rifle besides. And—this really gave me a turn—damned if he wasn't Chinese.”

When I didn't react, Nickles glowered impatiently. “You hear what I said? Chinese.”

I remembered what Ripinsky had told us about Lily's Yellow Peril theories. In order to preserve the rapport between us, I did my best to look shocked.

Nickles nodded, as if we shared some special knowledge. “Haven't been any of those in these parts since they hung the Chinaman back in the eighteen-fifties. When I saw that one, I decided I better rethink things. And while I was busy doing that, a third guy came out of the trailer and went over to the Chink. The Chink took one of the jeeps and drove off— patrolling, I guess. The other guy got out a folding chair and sat down in the sun. When I took a close look, I saw he was a Chink, too. And had a rifle.”

“So what did you do?”

“What any sensible person would—got the hell out of there.”

“I thought you spoke with one of the guards.”

“Who told you that?”

“Hy Ripinsky.”

She looked blank for an instant, then bellowed with laughter. “Son of a bitch believed me! I told him I offered to fuck the guy if he would tell me what was going on, and Ripinsky believed me!”

“Why did you say that?”

“Because Ripinsky hands me a pain. I kind of like to shock him. Besides, it made for a better story.”

“And why were you yelling at him when I saw you leave the trailer?”

Her mouth pulled down and hardened. “Son of a bitch called me a bigot.”

“Because of what you said about the guard being Chinese?”

“Uh-huh. Something weird's going on up there, and for all we know it could be a commie plot. You'd think Ripinsky would worry; he's been out in the world, he knows how things are. But no, all he says is that I'm talking stupid and that I shouldn't be calling them Chinks.”

I was silent for a while, thinking over what she'd told me. Nickles took it as disapproval, said defensively, “I'm
not
a bigot. I just don't like Chinks—or Japs or slopes. Indians, now—I can see in your face that you got some Indian blood. I grew up with Indians, think they're just as good as me.”

“But you didn't grow up around Asians.”

“Shit, no.” But she smiled. Lily Nickles was bright enough to have long ago figured out for herself what I was hinting at. I wondered how much of her racist talk was a put-on, of the same sort she'd pulled on Ripinsky.

I thought some more about the situation with the land on the mesa and isolated a fact that had been bothering me. “Lily, since Earl Hopwood's a prospector, why didn't he mine that acreage he owned on the mesa rather than sell it?”

“You got to know Earl to understand that. First of all, what he prospects for—
when
he bothers—are placer deposits, like me. That's gold that's been moved away from its source by erosion. But to get at what veins are left up there”—she gestured at the mesa—“you got to do hard-rock mining. Dig, blast, tunnel. Costs more. And it's damned hard, dangerous work. Earl Hopwood's lazy as they come.”

“Okay, I can understand why he didn't mine it, but why sell it for a price so far below market value?”

“Sold it cheap, did he? Well, what can I tell you?” She shrugged. “Earl's stupid. All the brains in that family got used up generations ago. It probably looked like a lot of money to him.”

“He must have realized—”

“Earl don't realize nothing. I tell you, we're talking
stupid
here. That cabin of his? He went and built it on land where there hasn't ever been so much as a nugget.”

“Ripinsky said the stream runs through there. Isn't that where you find placer gold?”

“Sure, but it runs too fast. You need slow-moving water— where there's a bend in the streambed, deep pools, gravel bars—for the gold to settle.”

“Is looking for signs like that what you meant when you talked about ‘reading the stream'?”

“Partly. It's simple; any fool can do it. But not Earl Hopwood. Instead he goes and builds his cabin on land he can't ever claim, much less own.”

Early that morning I'd read the file Anne-Marie had put together for me on staking claims to mineral rights; one of the requirements was proof of discovery of the mineral within the boundaries of the claim. To purchase land from the federal government under the patenting process, the requirements were even more stringent. Maybe we
were
talking stupid here; Hopwood certainly hadn't shown good sense in building his cabin on federal land where at any time the government could insist he demolish the structure.

Nickles said, “What's your name—McCone?”

I nodded.

“McCone, what do you think is going on up there?”

“I have no idea.”

“Me neither. But whatever it is, it scares the shit outta me.”