And the Hills Opened Up (8 page)

So let the foreman come home, damp with fever sweat and ornery as a wounded badger.  Bonnie would hold him even as he shook his fist in the air, hot spittle flying from his mouth.  Yes, just as long as it was him, with his rock smell and strong hands that had so often held her with a surprising gentleness, as if she too were a bouquet of honeysuckle held up in offering.

13

It defied physics and good sense, but the tunnel packed with the bodies of the dead and maimed did not collapse as Hank Chambers climbed across its sloppy floor, which was actually less a surface and more a constantly shifting mass of knees, elbows, and anguished faces he did not want to look upon.  The bodies were freshly dead, too, which made them unpleasantly warm and given to passing noxious fluids and gases with each pressing of his weight.  He did not know if it was the smell, the wetness, or his fever, but he felt his mind loosening as he slipped forward, its grinding cogs reverting to some ancient form of thought, his body an eel among eels.

His only focus was the light in his hand, which must not go out, which must not go out, which must not go out no matter what else might happen.  Chambers had spent much of his life edging darkness and he would not submit to it now, even if this was his final hour.  He bore the oil lamp before him with both hands, as if it were a newborn infant, or a touchy stick of dynamite, and as he scrambled on his knees and elbows more screaming came from the end of the tunnel.

Light appeared, revealing the tunnel’s dripping exit.  Chambers crawled forward and poked his head above a jutted knee, looking into the section they’d opened that afternoon. 

The new section was lit by at least a dozen candles.  Bodies were heaped upon the ground and strewn among the piled rock.  Some of the men were still quivering, like fish thrown onto dry land, and some were missing their heads entire.  Among the dead and dying strode a skeletal figure clothed only in a skin of black char, as if he’d been roasted all the way through.  He had long, dangling arms and enormous hands that ended in claw-like fingers.  He walked like a specter made flesh, his movements swift and abrupt, a flurry of odd gestures unlike any Chambers had seen before. 

The few patches of skin visible among the Charred Man’s body were a pale, clammy white.  Chambers noted a patch of white on the Charred Man’s hip, a second on his throat, a third on his cheek, and a fourth on his knee.  The spots had a mesmerizing effect, blurring together as the Charred Man circled the room, and it took Chambers a moment to recall the great danger he was in. 

That was no mortal human being out there, gloating over the seventy-plus men he’d dispatched in less than an hour.  This was something truly wicked, like a creature from the old German stories his grandmother had told him as a boy.  This was a devil, a demon, a killer of men. 

One of the wounded screamed near the tunnel’s opening.  Chambers sank further into the bodies piled beneath him, shielding his lamp with his hand.  He heard a scuttling, a loud tear, and the man shrieked one final time before falling silent.  Then came a smacking sound, somehow dry and wet at the same time.  

Christ almighty.

The Charred Man was taking his own time with these final victims, like a child torturing a wounded bird, or a man savoring a fine whiskey.  He was taking his time but soon enough he’d run out of food to play with and grow bored.  He’d start making his way through the rest of the mine, tunnel after tunnel, until he reached an exit, emerged into the evening air, and came down from the hills.

Chambers heard more scuttling beyond the tunnel and took a deep breath.  The rifle on his shoulder poked into his back, as uncomfortable as the many knees and elbows beneath him.  He lifted his body enough to unsling the gun and set it beside him.  It looked so small and futile now, more like a stick of wood, a twig.  He reckoned a shot at the Charred Man would be neigh on impossible from this angle and would do little more than reveal his position.  He’d likely get off one shot, maybe two, before the speedy devil fell upon him with those long arms and clawed fingers. 

No.  He needed to figure a way to stop this wickedness before it got any further.  The mine’s operations had somehow unleashed this creature upon the world and it was his responsibility to see it stopped before any worse could be done.  He couldn’t do anything more for his men, even the one’s still breathing, but he could still save the town up above. 

And Bonnie. 

He could make sure she never met the Charred Man.

It wasn’t easy to turn around in the cramped tunnel but somehow Chambers managed to do it without losing the light of his lamp or disrupting the ceiling of dead above him (even if it did appear that gravity was beginning to have its way, after all, pulling down the occasional loose arm or leg so suddenly it dropped in front of Chambers as if waving howdy).  He abandoned his rifle, preferring to move with less hindrance and drag, and crawled as fast as he could back down the tunnel.  He moved faster than before, less timid with the cooling bodies beneath him, rudely placing his knees and elbows wherever he damn well pleased.  It was funny how a man could get used to about anything if he had to, even the close proximity of the maimed.

Still, when Chambers came out of the tunnel and stepped onto the firm rock floor, it was a relief so great his knees buckled and he was forced to lean against the wall a moment.  Among all the horrors of the tunnel, he’d forgotten the smell of good clean air. 

“God-damn,” Chambers whispered.  “God-damn.”

Chambers pushed off from the wall and raised his lantern.  The bodies lying on the ground in this room now seemed scarce compared to those cramming the last tunnel and the room beyond it.  He made his way across the room easily enough, stepping over and around the dead, and entered the tunnel beyond, where he stepped over four more bodies and started climbing up the access shaft.  He thought he heard something scuttling behind him but pushed the thought away, deciding there would be no advantage to knowing his death was approaching.  Climbing was the thing to do now, so long as he could climb, so long as nothing caught him by the foot and dragged him back down.

The foreman passed the opening to the second level and kept going.  Sweat ran down his forehead in rivulets—he could not tell if it was from the exertion or the fever.  A feeling of buoyancy had come over him, a lightness in his bones that made climbing easier.  He kept his gaze upward, ever seeking.  When he reached the top of the access shaft he set his lamp above the final rung of the ladder and swung his legs over onto solid rock.  It was only then, after gathering himself and getting to his feet, that the foreman allowed himself to look back down the shaft.

Nothing there.

No Charred Man, no dead men returned to life.  Just an empty ladder, descending into the dark.

He understood what he’d found below was not a feverish nightmare, however.  Blood, urine, and other bodily fluids covered his clothes, his skin.  The bats could smell him and they kept their distance, flitting as far above him as they could get. 

“You don’t like that, do you?   Don’t like my stench much.”

Chambers laughed and coughed into his sticky, foul smelling hand.  In all his years working beneath the earth he’d never felt as filthy as he did now.  He wasn’t just one man; he was one man covered with the excretions of dozens more.  If Bonnie could see him now, she’d holler murder and send him straight to the nearest creek with a bar of soap and orders to not return until every inch of his body was scrubbed pink and his clothes burned to cinders.

The foreman started down the next tunnel, reminded of the precious nature of his time.  His legs were stiffening beneath him, a fiery pain arcing through his right hip, but he forced himself to maintain a steady pace.  This tunnel, more than any of the others behind him, seemed to take longest of all, an exercise in sweat and torture, but Chambers at last found himself in the mine’s large front room, the shelves loaded with supplies like the table of the Last Supper loaded with food.

He went straight to the dynamite.

They had four crates on hand.  Chambers hauled two out of the mine, squinting at the evening light (weak as it was), and opened the other two just inside the entrance.  He stuck blast caps into about two dozen sticks, ran their fuse lines outside, and set the individual sticks into as many lode bearing nooks and crannies as he could find, using a spare ladder and a hand pick to wedge more sticks into the sloping roof above the mine’s entrance.  He didn’t have time to cap the hundred extra sticks of dynamite but he scattered them all around the chamber anyhow, hoping they’d be set off by the initial explosion.  Hell, the nitroglycerine made them unstable enough already, liable to go off from a loud sneeze or good shaking.

It took Chambers about ten quick minutes to finish the whole setup.  His men would have laughed to see what a slipshod job their foreman had done, how none of the sticks had been stuck inside a properly drilled hole, but it looked like it would get the job done regardless.  Chambers picked up his lantern and backed through the mine’s entrance until he stood ten feet on the other side, the strands of fuse wire lying tangled at his feet beside the crates of extra explosives.

Chambers wiped the sweat from his brow as he peered into the entrance.  He felt called upon to speak. 

“I’m sorry to leave you all like this, without a proper Christian burial and all, but I think you’d understand.  What happened to you down there was a horror, a terrible, terrible horror, and you gave your lives for the Dennison Mining Company, whether you wanted to or not.  Mostly not, I assume.”

Chambers blinked and felt close to swooning.  His fever was roaring now, like a wild and angry beast inside his mind.  He’d be bedridden for a week after this, if he ever rose up again at all.

“I’ll do my best to see to it that Mr. Dennison gives satisfaction to your families, but I can’t make any promises.  I’m sure you’ve all heard how tightfisted that old son-of-a-bitch can be.” 

Chambers chuckled and wiped away more sweat from his brow.  The salty water came on and on, like he was a wet cloth being squeezed.

“May the Lord watch over you all now, far better than I did.”

The wind picked up and blew into the cave.  Chambers leaned over the tangle of fuses, ready to light them all with the lantern in his hand.  But, as he did so, he felt something hard jab him in the back. 

“You light those fuses, Mr. Chambers, and I’ll have to shoot you dead.”

That was the end of a pistol, he realized. 

“You hear me?”

“Yes,” Chambers said, still deciding as he peered into the lantern’s flame.

“Why don’t you step back, sir?  Just step back and we can talk this over.”

Chambers sighed.  He felt so tired.  So tired and he just wanted to be back in his bed, being fussed over.

“You know I don’t want to make Bonnie a widow, Mr. Chambers.”

A click as the pistol was cocked.  Chambers straightened, slowly, and turned to look at who had the gun on him. 

Atkins.  Young Sheriff Atkins, looking as stiff and scared as a rabbit chased to the edge of a cliff, with a shiny silver star on his chest and handful of men behind him.  A fresh rivulet of sweat ran into Chambers’ eyes, but he let it stay there, not wanting to risk the sudden movement.  A gust of foul smelling air blew out of the mine’s entrance, as if the hills themselves were exhaling.

Chamber’s licked his lips, wondering how best to explain himself before one more guest showed up to the party.

14

She’d known he wasn’t a miner by the way he’d come up those stairs—his stride smooth and easy, with no stoop in his back.  His eyes bright and ready.  No miner in Red Earth carried himself in such a way, like a cat ready to spring.

Ingrid Blomvik liked that.  She liked how the stranger walked.

He offered his hand and introduced himself as Elwood Hayes, pausing for a second like his name meant something.  He was a good-looking man, in a hardscrabble way, and that was novelty enough in Red Earth.  She almost hoped he’d ask to see her bedroom, her arrangement with Revis Cooke notwithstanding.  She wouldn’t have minded lying down with a comely man for once, somebody you didn’t mind watching work above you.

But Mr. Elwood Hayes had not wanted any of that.  His proposition was even more interesting, mad as it was.  A real heist, like you’d read about in the papers.  And he looked like he meant it, too, as if he were a man used to setting his will against something and seeing it through.  He’d reminded her of Erik that way, except Hayes had less innocence to his eyes, less joyfulness.  When he asked her to join them, to actually rob that bastard Revis Cooke blind, she’d felt her heart leap in her chest, a new wind blowing through town so clean and pure she could almost smell the Pacific Ocean on it.  Even if he was planning to double cross her later, or his plan was doomed to fail, Elwood Hayes had given her a solid reason to pick up and leave town, breaking the spell of indecision that had hung over her for so long, sucking the very life out of her.  She’d had enough of this perdition—Revis Cooke could play with his own pecker from here on out, if he could stand touching himself. 

Ingrid had felt pure giddiness, hustling back to her room to pack her few things into a suitcase and make her getaway.  A little bird of happiness fluttered inside her heart, a bird she hadn’t felt in years, and it flitted around and around as she folded her clothes and packed them away with the book of Tennyson. 

Then she heard a gunshot, and the bird went still. 

Ingrid dropped the shawl in her hands and darted back down the hall.  She ran up to the railing, heedless of the danger, and looked down into the mess below. 

And it was a mess, indeed.  The stagecoach guards and Elwood’s gang were firing at each other from across the saloon like this was a battlefield in the Civil War.  Madam Petrov had dropped behind the bar with Caleb and a bald man was lying near the foot of the stairs, knocked out cold.  She could just make out Elwood Hayes through the fog of gun smoke, fighting off another guard from a sitting position.  Ingrid caught a flash of metal in the guard’s hand, took it for a knife, and prepared to watch her new business partner die before her eyes, stuck and bleeding onto the saloon’s floor.

But then a loud crack, rising above the others, and the guard’s head flew backward as if he’d been punched. 

And a pistol in the hand of Elwood Hayes, where none had been a moment before. 

Ingrid’s mouth formed a small, silent O as heat rose in her cheeks.  Hayes scuttled back behind an overturned table while the other men continued to fire, both sides dug in behind tables of their own.  The room filled with so much gunpowder smoke the air turned murky. 

Emerging from behind his overturned table, Hayes began to crawl across the floor toward the two remaining guards.  Ingrid’s eyes watered from the smoke and she drew a handkerchief from her pocket to cover her mouth.  She could see Hayes was exposed but nobody else paid him mind at all.  He kept crawling, elbow after elbow, while his gang fired and the stagecoach guards fired back and nobody hit much of anything excepting table and rafter. 

Their own powder was blinding them.

Ingrid bit her lip as Elwood Hayes approached the two coach guards, coming at them from an angle.  When he got about five feet from their overturned table he sprung up, planted his feet, and fired a shot into each man at a range so close he could have kicked them instead. 

The shooting ceased.  Nothing felled Hayes.  The resulting silence was both awful and grand and Ingrid heard a faint ringing in her ears. 

She’d found her man.

Elwood enjoyed the scene as the smoke cleared.  The saloon filled with whores, who gawked at the dead men and the blood pooling around them.  The Madam cursed loudly in her home tongue as she came out from behind the counter and directed the whores to tend to the last stagecoach guard still living.  They wrapped the bald man’s shot knee while he came round and started to scream in great earnestness.

The bartender left the saloon to find the sheriff and arrange
the delivery of three more coffins.  None of the Hayes crew had kicked: Clem Stubbs was plugged in the shoulder, a bullet had grazed Owen’s thigh, and Roach Clayton had cracked a spectacle lens.  Elwood told himself that he’d done well, done about as good as could be expected under such circumstances, but he still wondered if three men had needed to die so he could go upstairs and jaw with Ms. Ingrid Blomvik for five minutes.  Part of him had known the coach guards wouldn’t like him going up to the balcony, before God and all, and that doing so was bound to raise their hackles.  And that same part, that same devil inside him, hadn’t cared one bit if he and everyone else died tonight, so long as it was halfway interesting.

But they didn’t have time for dwelling on the past.  The wounded needed tending and he was the only surgeon on hand.  Hayes cleaned the blade of his knife with a whiskey soaked rag and started with the worst case first.

“Lord Sweet Jesus.”

“Hang on, Clem.  I need to find the bullet.”

“Sweet Jesus sweet Jesus.  I think I can feel you scraping against my arm bone, El.  You hear that scraping?”

“Hush. This ain’t the first time I’ve dug a bullet from your hide.”

“No, but it’s the first time you had to dig like it was buried treasure.”

Elwood smiled at the idea of buried treasure and pushed the tip of his hunting knife a little further into Stubb’s shoulder.  Roach had already flushed Owen’s wound with whiskey and bound it tight with a bar rag.  The two of them sat at one of the few tables still upright, watching Elwood work on Stubbs like they were watching a play.  Owen was white as a sheet and hadn’t said three words since the shootout. 

Elwood nicked something with gristle to it and Stubbs howled. 

“Give him some more whiskey, Roach.  Give him all he
can swallow.” 

Roach handed over the bottle from their table.  Stubbs took it with his good arm and swallowed a third of it in one long gulp, his fat gut pushing out against the fabric of his shirt.

“You ready, Stubbs?”

Stubbs lowered the bottle and let out a loud belch.  Whiskey trickled down his beard and onto the floor. 

“Fiddle shits,” he shouted, handing the bottle back to Roach.  “Have your way with me, Doc Pain.”

Hayes renewed his digging until he found the slug tucked under a strip of muscle and popped it out with the tip of his knife.  The slug made a hollow plunking sound as it dropped to the floor.  Owen leaned to the side in his chair, coiled up, and retched heartily.

Stubbs laughed through the tears in his eyes.  “Sweet Mary,” he sputtered.  “Aren’t we all a pretty sight.”

“Fit for Paris,” Elwood agreed.  “Now, don’t move while I wrap your arm.”

“Why?  You going to shoot me sideways, too?”

“If I have to.”

Stubbs laughed again, but looked him over as if he wasn’t sure it was a joke.  Elwood kept his face straight and staunched the flow of blood with a shirt taken from a dead guard.  He wrapped the shirt round the big man’s arm and tied it off with a leather belt, which he’d also filched from the dead guard.  Stubbs shuddered from the pain but held off from more bellyaching—either the whiskey was doing its work or poor Stubbs was starting to feel it for certain.

Ingrid Blomvik stepped out of the crowd and set her hand on Owen’s shoulder.  “Here.  Drink some of this.”

Elwood blinked and raised his head. 

“Owen.”

His brother stared into the distance, a brown spot of vomit still on his cheek. 

“Owen, Miss Blomvik is talking to you.”

Ingrid pulled a silk scarf from her pocket and dabbed at the spot of vomit.  Owen sat there and allowed himself to be attended to, more docile than he’d ever been for their mother when she’d tried the same at church.  Roach shook his head and removed his spectacles to consider the cracked lens.  His wiry body looked smaller than normal, as if Roach had drawn himself in during the shooting and hadn’t quite let himself puff back out yet.

“Owen’s spooked, El.  That leg graze is the least of his wounds.”

“He’ll come back round.  He’s just never traded lead before.  You always get a good jolt, your first shootout.”

Ingrid cupped Owen’s chin in her hands, helping him pry his jaw loose.  She held the glass to his lips and tipped it back, sending the water into his mouth.  Owen sputtered, spitting out half the water and swallowing the other.  His eyes regained some clarity and he took another drink, looking up at the whore with the big brown eyes of a grateful pup.  “That’s my brother,” Elwood said, his voice too loud and abrupt in his own ears.  “That’s Owen Hayes.”

Ingrid smiled, her teeth clean and even and white. 

“Howdy, Owen.  So you’re this gunslinger’s little brother?  Must have had a rough time of it growing up.”

Owen nodded, still staring up at Ingrid like a flower into the sun.

“He fought anybody about anything.”

“Did he now?”

“He’d fight you over how many stars were in the sky.  He threw me out of a tree once and I broke my arm.”

Elwood laughed, remembering the day.  His brother flapping his arms and hollering his lungs out.  The feel of their father’s belt against his back, later that afternoon.  Cracking the air like thunder.

“Well, I say.  Is that true, Mr. Hayes?  Did you throw Owen from a tree?”

“No, ma’am.  He was trying to throw me out and got the wrong end of it.  He was mad a girl liked me and not himself.”

Stubbs, who’d sunk into his chair until his beard touched his belt, groaned and slid to the floor, lying down on his good side.  Elwood rubbed his face in his hands, wondering how they were going to fly town now.  And that sheriff would come back from the mine, sooner or later, asking more questions.  They could deal with him, maybe, but if they killed a company lawman you could bet the Dennison Mining Company would be twice as likely to pursue them across the States, maybe all the way into Mexico. 

“What you doing, Stubbs?”

“My arm hurts.”

“You shouldn’t lie down after you’ve been shot.”

“Why the hell not?”

“You need to get good air.  Down on the ground is where all the bad, musty air settles.” 

“I never heard that before.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it wrong, does it?”

Stubbs sighed and sat up.

“I wish I were smart like you, Elwood.  Like how you snuck up on those shotguns sideways like that.  Bang, bang.  Fight’s over go on home, everybody.  That was fine reckoning.”

“I got lucky, is all.”

“And you’re quick, too,” Roach said, settling his spectacles back on his face.  “I never seen anybody move that swift.”

Stubbs nodded.

“I’ll say.  I’d prefer to be speedy, myself, but my weight don’t allow it.”

The Madam had regained her wits and started ordering her doves around, tasking them with returning the saloon to order.  She examined the man Hayes had shot between the eyes, the knife man, with a pinched look of distaste and clucked her tongue.  She sailed across the room and brought her large, round frame right up to Elwood’s chest.

“Look!  Just look!”

“I’m sorry about the mess, ma’am—”

“You kill our customers—how will we make money tonight?  No miners and now no coachmen, either.”

“I can pay for the damages.”

The madam’s eyes softened.  She looked from Elwood to Stubbs, who was still sitting on the floor as his bandage darkened.

“Really?  You can pay?”

She held out her hand.  Elwood shifted on his feet and glanced at Ingrid.  Her face had gone blank, as if they’d never spoken a word between them.

“Well, not right this moment.  But before we leave town.”

The madam laughed, a high, trilling sound that reminded Elwood of barbed wire and caused him to turn away and inspect the saloon.  He saw the poorly dressed girls lifting tables and chairs back to their feet, their backs curved like old women, their movements cautious and sore.  He saw three dead men who needn’t have died that evening lying on the ground, waiting for their coffins.  He saw Roach Clayton with a cracked spectacle lens and Clem Stubbs lying like an upturned turtle on the floor and his brother, pale and hollow-eyed, with a wrap around his thigh.  Most of all, though, Hayes saw Ingrid Blomvik, watching him with those damn blue eyes of hers, hoping this would all turn out good, hoping that she’d hitched her wagon to the right horse.  It was a look like that made a man regret losing his temper, even if the ill-mannered bastards he’d shot had deserved it more than most.