Desperation (45 page)

The man uttered a short, rueful laugh. “In a way, that's pretty funny, but never mind. Let's stay focused here. What do you know of the nature of God, David? What is your experience?”

With the greatest reluctance, David said: “God is cruel.”

He looked down at his hands again and counted slowly to five. When he had reached it and still hadn't been fried by a lightning-bolt, he looked up again. The man in the jeans and tee-shirt was still grave and intent, but David saw no anger in him.

“That's right, God is cruel. We slow down, the mummy always catches us in the end, and God is cruel. Why is God cruel, David?”

For a moment he didn't answer, and then something Reverend Martin had said came to him—the TV in the corner had been broadcasting a soundless spring-training baseball game that day.

“God's cruelty is refining,” he said.

“We're the mine and God is the miner?”

“Well—”

“And all cruelty is good? God is good and cruelty is good?”

“No, hardly any of it's good!” David said. For a single horrified second he saw Pie, dangling from the hook on the wall, Pie who walked around ants on the sidewalk because she didn't want to hurt them.

“What is cruelty done for evil?”

“Malice. Who are you, sir?”

“Never mind. Who is the father of malice?”

“The devil . . . or maybe those other gods my mother talked about.”

“Never mind
can tah
and
can tak,
at least for now. We have bigger fish to fry, so pay attention. What is faith?”

That one was easy. “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

“Yeah. And what is the spiritual state of the faithful?”

“Um . . . love and acceptance. I think.”

“And what is the opposite of faith?”

That was tougher—a real hairball, in fact. Like one of those damned reading-achievement tests. Pick
a, b, c,
or
d.
Except here you didn't even get the choices. “Disbelief?” he ventured.

“No. Not disbelief but
un
belief. The first is natural, the second willful. And when one is in unbelief, David, what is that one's spiritual state?”

He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don't know.”

“Yes you do.”

He thought about it and realized he did. “The spiritual state of unbelief is desperation.”

“Yes. Look down, David!”

He did, and was shocked to see that the Viet Cong Lookout was no longer in the tree. It now floated, like a magic carpet made out of boards, above a vast, blighted countryside. He could see buildings here and there amid rows of gray and listless plants. One was a trailer with a bumper-sticker proclaiming the owner a Snapple-drinkin', Clinton-bashin' son of a bitch; another was the mining Quonset they'd seen on the way into town; another was the Municipal Building; another was Bud's Suds. The grinning leprechaun with the pot of gold under his arm peered out of a dead and strangulated jungle.

“This is the poisoned field,” the man in the reflector sunglasses said. “What's gone on here makes Agent Orange look like sugar candy. There will be no sweetening this earth. It must be eradicated—sown with salt and plowed under. Do you know why?”

“Because it will spread?”

“No. It can't. Evil is both fragile and stupid, dying soon after the ecosystem it's poisoned.”

“Then why—”

“Because it's an affront to God. There is no other reason. Nothing hidden or held back, no fine print. The poisoned field is a perversity and an affront to God. Now look down again.”

He did. The buildings had slipped behind them. Now the Viet Cong Lookout floated above a vast pit. From this perspective, it looked like a sore which has rotted through the skin of the earth and into its underlying flesh. The sides sloped inward and downward in neat zigzags like stairs; in a way, looking into this place was like looking into

(walk a little faster)

a pyramid turned inside out. There were pines in the hills south of the pit, and some growth high up around the edges, but the pit itself was sterile—not even juniper grew here. On the near side—it would be the north face, David supposed, if the poisoned field was the town of Desperation—these neat setbacks had broken through near the bottom. Where they had been there was now a long slope of stony rubble. At the site of the landslide, and not too far from the broad gravel road leading down from the rim of the pit, there was a black and gaping hole. The sight of it made David profoundly uneasy. It was as if a monster buried in the desert ground had opened one eye. The landslide surrounding it made him uneasy, too. Because it looked somehow . . . well . . .
planned.

At the bottom of the pit, just below the ragged hole, was a parking area filled with ore-freighters, diggers, pickup trucks, and tread-equipped vehicles that looked sort of like World War II tanks. Nearby stood a rusty Quonset hut with a stove-stack sticking crooked out of the roof,
WELCOME TO RATTLESNAKE
#2, read the sign on the door.
PROVIDING JOBS AND TAX-DOLLARS TO CENTRAL NEVADA SINCE
1951. Off to the left of the metal building was a squat concrete cube. The sign on this one was briefer:

POWDER MAGAZINE

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

Parked between the two buildings was Collie Entragian's road-dusty Caprice. The driver's door stood open and the domelight was on, illuminating an interior that looked like an abattoir. On the dash, a plastic bear with a noddy head had been stuck beside the compass.

Then all that was sliding behind them.

“You know this place, don't you, David?”

“Is it the China Pit? It is, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

They swooped closer to the side, and David saw that the pit was, in its way, even more desolate than the poisoned field. There were no whole stones or outcrops in the earth, at least not that he could see; everything had been reduced to an awful yellow rubble. Beyond the parking area and the buildings were vast heaps of even more radically crumbled rock, piled on black plastic.

“Those are waste dumps,” his guide remarked. “The stuff piled on the plastic is gangue—spoil. But the company's not ready to let it rest, even now. There's more in it, you see . . . gold, silver, molybdenum, platinum. And copper, of course. Mostly it's copper. Deposits so diffuse it's as if they were blown in there like smoke. Mining it used to be uneconomic, but as the world's major deposits of ore and metal are depleted, what used to be uneconomic becomes profitable. The oversized Hefty bags are collection pads—the stuff they want precipitates out onto them, and they just scrape it off. It's a leaching process—spell it either way and it comes to the same. They'll go on working the ground until all of this, which used to be a mountain almost eight thousand feet high, is just dust in the wind.”

“What are those big steps coming down the side of the pit?”

“Benches. They serve as ringroads for heavy equipment around the pit, but their major purpose is to minimize earthslides.”

“It doesn't look like it worked very well back there.” David hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Up here, either.” They were nearing another area where the look of vast stairs descending into the earth was obliterated by a tilted range of crumbled rock.

“That's a slope failure.” The Viet Cong Lookout swooped above the slide area. Beyond it, David saw networks of black stuff that at first looked like cobwebs. As they drew nearer, he saw that the strands of what looked like cobwebbing were actually PVC pipe.

“Just lately it's been a switchover from rainbirds to emitters.” His guide spoke in the tone of one who recites rather than speaks. David had a moment of
déjà vu,
then realized why: the man was repeating what Audrey Wyler had already said. “A few eagles died.”

“A few?” David asked, giving Mr. Billingsley's line.

“All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there's no shortage of eagles in Nevada. Do you see what they replaced the rainbirds with, David? The big pipes are distribution heads—
can taks,
let's say.”

“Big gods.”

“Yes! And those little hollow cords that stretch between them like mesh, those are emitters.
Can tahs.
They drip weak sulfuric acid. It frees the ore . . . and rots the ground. Hang on, David.”

The Viet Cong Lookout banked—also like a flying carpet—with David holding onto the edge of the boards to keep from tumbling off. He didn't want to fall onto that terrible gouged ground where nothing grew and streams of brackish fluid flowed down to the plastic collection pads.

They sank into the pit again and passed above the rusty Quonset with the stove-stack, the powder magazine, and the cluster of machinery where the road ended. Up the slope, above the gaping hole, was a wide area pocked with other, much smaller holes. David thought there had to be fifty of them at least, probably more. From each poked a yellow-tipped stick.

“Looks like the world's biggest gopher colony.”

“This is a blast-face, and those are blast-holes,” his new acquaintance lectured. “The active mining is going on right here. Each of those holes is three feet in diameter and about thirty feet deep. When you're getting ready to shoot, you lower a stick of dynamite with a blasting cap on it to the bottom of each hole. That's the igniter. Then you pour in a couple of wheelbarrows' worth of ANFO—stands for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Those assholes who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City used ANFO. It usually comes in pellets that look like white BBs.”

The man in the Yankees cap pointed to the powder magazine.

“Lots of ANFO in there. No dynamite—they used up the last on the day all this started to happen—but plenty of ANFO.”

“I don't understand why you're telling me this.”

“Never mind, just listen. Do you see the blast-holes?”

“Yes. They look like eyes.”

“That's right, holes like eyes. They're sunk into the porphyry, which is crystalline. When the ANFO is detonated, it shatters the rock. The shattered stuff contains the ore. Get it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“That material is trucked away to the leach pads, the distribution heads and emitters—
can tah, can tak
—are laid over it, and the rotting process begins.
Voilà,
there you have it, leach-ore mining at its very finest. But see what the last blast-pattern uncovered, David!”

He pointed at the big hole, and David felt an unpleasant, debilitating coldness begin to creep through him. The hole seemed to stare up at him with a kind of idiot invitation.

“What is it?” he whispered, but he supposed he knew.

“Rattlesnake Number One. Also known as the China Mine or the China Shaft or the China Drift. The last series of shots uncovered it. To say the crew was surprised would be an understatement, because nobody in the Nevada mining business really believes that old story. By the turn of the century, the Diablo Company was claiming that Number One was simply shut down when the vein played out. But it's been here, David. All along. And now—”

“Is it haunted?” David asked, shivering. “It is, isn't it?”

“Oh yes,” the man in the Yankees cap said, turning his silvery no-eyes on David. “Yes indeed.”

“Whatever you brought me up here for, I don't want to hear it!” David cried. “I want you to take me back! Back to my dad! I hate this! I hate being in the Land of the—”

He broke off as a horrible thought struck him. The Land of the Dead, that was what the man had said. He'd called David an exception. But that meant—

“Reverend Martin . . . I saw him on my way to the Woods. Is he . . .”

The man looked briefly down at his old-fashioned radio, then looked back up again and nodded. “Two days after you left, David.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Toward the end he was always drunk. Like Billingsley.”

“Was it suicide?”

“No,” the man in the Yankees cap said, and put a kindly hand on the back of David's neck. It was warm, not the hand of a dead person. “At least, not
conscious
suicide. He and his wife went to the beach. They took a picnic. He went in the water too soon after lunch, and swam out too far.”

“Take me back,” David whispered. “I'm tired of all this death.”

“The poisoned field is an affront to God,” the man said. “I know it's a bummer, David, but—”

“Then let God clean it up!” David cried. “It's not fair for him to come to me after he killed my mother and my sister—”

“He didn't—”

“I don't care! I don't care! Even if he didn't, he stood aside and let it happen!”

“That's not true, either.”

David shut his eyes and clapped his hands to his ears. He didn't want to hear any more. He
refused
to hear any more. Yet the man's voice came through anyway. It was relentless. He would be able to escape it no more than Jonah had been able to escape God. God was as relentless as a bloodhound on a fresh scent. And God was cruel.

“Why are you on earth?” The voice seemed to come from
inside
his head now.

“I don't hear you! I don't hear you!”

“You were put on earth to love God—”

“No!”

“—and serve him.”

“No! Fuck God! Fuck his love! Fuck his
service
!”

“God can't make you do anything you don't want to—”

“Stop it! I won't listen, I won't decide! Do you hear? Do you—”

“Shh—listen!”

Not quite against his will, David listened.

PART IV

THE CHINA PIT:

GOD IS CRUEL