They followed Carver’s suggestions and built with thick wood logs and stone, much of it foraged from their land. Since Ray had a twinge in his back that once set off, laid him down vertical for a few days, an old horse injury he said, he gave Greg the job of hauling all the rocks up from the creek. While Ray did most of the designing, building, sawing the logs (with a chainsaw of course) and mortaring he had Greg wade in freezing water, because they wanted to get the house out of the way before the summer gold dredging season, and the snow was so thick it didn’t thaw completely until the middle of June, pulling up stones that felt like ice boulders dripping little icicles all over him as he hobbled up the steep ravine with his 30lb babies one by one. By Memorial Day he was ready to kill Ray.
First they only needed a few for the foundation, then he wanted the corners to be stone for reinforcement, then he thought they should have stone lining the window and door frames, then he thought they should do a stone wall to keep the snow back from the hillside behind. Greg had cleared much of the creek and the river of the easy pickings by that time and was now forced to wade further into the deeper water, that grew deeper as the snow melted, freezing his ankles. Each night he slept with his hands and feet in gloves and booties soaked in lotion to stop the cracking.
Memorial Day was a gorgeous one, with a deep blue sky and fluffy white clouds, temperatures up around 70 when Greg tromped down into the water and eyed the hulk of a boulder, about the size of a standard-sized car engine that provided the capstone to a squat pyramid of smaller, more manageable stones beneath. Greg knew if he could only move that Pontiac he could clear the way for a bounty of building materials that would not break his back, and the air had finally hit the temperature for him to wade into the deeper waters where he could get a better angle and not leave him running for the trailer heater. When it wouldn’t dislodge with a knock of the shoulder he felt bold enough to reach in, soaking all but his face and back, to shift aside a rock underneath that was loose enough to give. Then he tried again. It shifted. He pulled out some more stones. One more heft and it rolled back towards the bank for a moment and then careened back towards him into the creek. But it had not regained its spot, the base of the pyramid, he discovered, was just a halo of smaller stones that had gathered around it. He shivered and looked up to the sky to see when the cloud that covered the heat-giving sun would pass, and when it finally did he looked down to catch something shimmering from the middle of the rock circle in the water.
When Ray first gave him this back-breaking duty he did so with the incentive that Greg might find gold, though they both knew that nobody just found gold sitting there these days, you had to dig and dredge and mine for it, and since the mere thought of this incentive soured him against the possibility he kept his hopes at bay until he grasped it in his hand and pulled it out of the water. On feeling its heft he knew, he brought it to his face and thought to himself, ‘that’s a ring. That’s a ring I’ll give my wife someday.’ And then he thought about Ray. It was Ray’s land, Ray was only too nice to invite him along. The nugget partially belonged to Ray. Though tired and spiteful, he was too excited not to share, and that gave Greg all the reassurance he needed to lead him in the right direction, and he scrambled up the bank to show Ray.
The roof proved the biggest challenge, not from a design or build aspect, but both men were itching to get back into the river. However, it went faster with both of their efforts, and by mid-June they abandoned the empty shell of a house in which they just used to store their stuff, sleeping on the floor in empty bedrooms, and started on the waterways in earnest.
When Greg showed Ray the nugget he found he tossed the rag he had in his hand on the ground and said, ‘damn, I knew it! Well, it’s yours, but I’m going to find a bigger one when I get down there.’
Ray started researching gold digging since he first learned about the land, and opted for the dredging method of sifting through the soft sand of riverbeds. Greg plied the creek, and Ray went for the river, and by the end of July they had found four more nuggets all smaller than the original. Ray had located a jewelry dealer in Reno who paid good prices but advised to wait until the mountains became miserable in the winter to make the trip. In the meantime they wanted to suck as much river time as they could during the temperate season.
Dreams about the river would wake Greg in the morning and make it hard to sleep at night, and somewhere in the middle an anxious monotony set in. Usually they came home emptyhanded, but each find heightened the excitement. Sometime during the course of the day Greg would start feeling cramps and dizziness, and he would realize he was hungry. Where life on the farm had centered around breaks for three huge meals now eating amounted to chugging beans out of a can while standing hip high in water. Now they only made it into Sunny Springs on Saturday nights to relax, and every few weeks one of them would drive to Sage Springs for supplies, and it was usually Ray because he had the funds while Greg had the strength to work all day long.
During one of these absences Greg decided to try a whole new change of scenery. He followed the creek to the west end where it formed a small little waterfall over the cliff face on that side. He imagined that some gold may have collected at that edge. He walked along the water, head down at all times scanning for any shimmer, stopping and poking the rocks with a stick every now and then, when he heard what sounded like a warbler. As he continued on the sound got louder until he stopped at the recognition of words. The trickle of the water drowned out the meaning of it but he heard words like ‘me’ and ‘be’, too high on the register for a warbler, who tend to sound like someone trying to talk while gurgling. And though he had long suppressed that fishbowl feeling that the woods were watching him the sound of talking revived that latent shiver in an instant and he raised his head to see a strange shape behind a small waterfall that emerged from a rock about 10 yards away to his right and tumbled down some stones to contribute to his creek. From the color of it he thought he had found a rock face of pure gold and started towards it until it giggled and a girl’s head stuck out, “Found me!” she said, the water slicking her hair and filling her smiling mouth.
She pulled her head back and for a second Greg stood there too shocked at the company to know what to say. Finally the decorum of a farm boy kicked in and he apologized for his intrusion. “I scared you huh” she said, sticking her head farther through the water so he could clearly see she had no clothes on.
In an instant he swiveled 180 degrees, which only raised the pitch of her giggling into what sounded like a taunt. He started walking away muttering apologies when she called to his back, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were shy. Don’t go away; I’ve been wanting to meet you.”
He halted but stood unsure of his next action. He could hear splashing behind him. “We usually go to town on Saturday nights,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”
“I don’t go to town much,” she said. He heard some cracking twigs to indicate she might have stepped onto land.
“Then how do you know about me?”
“I heard about you,” she said, “but no wonder I didn’t meet you before. Boy, are you shy!”
He gave a quarter turn, which was enough to see her leaning against a tree with some dirty canvas shoes missing laces on and nothing else. “I’m sorry miss,” he said, “my momma taught me not to look at a lady with no clothes on.”
“Oh, is that it?” she said apologetically, “I always thought that boys liked looking at naked girls.”
“You got to believe it Ray,” Greg said later, “the way she said it, it was the most innocent thing. She must of heard her brothers say stuff and decided to try it on the first guy she saw.”
“Lucky it was you,” Ray said.
When Greg turned around the view still looked like something a teenage boy would hang on his wall. She had fitted on a short skirt and a halter top which her clung to her still soaked protrusions. He had trouble determining her age so didn’t ask. If she said 14 or 24 neither would surprise him. She had the frame of a girl, long limbed but not tall, as if she had yet to grow into her extremities. But however long ago it happened, she had definitely passed puberty.
He would have asked her where she came from, if not for fear of the same question, but she seemed unconcerned by his silence and filled the air with her words instead. “My mom would say something like that. She doesn’t like me.”
“Well, moms can be tough on their kids,” he responded.
“Not mine, she just doesn’t like me,” she said, strolling along the creek balancing on the stones.
He followed her.
“She likes everyone else…but my dad,” she giggled. “That’s why she moved back in with grandma…and Alice, and Kimberly, and Jessie, but we see Jessie sometimes. I don’t know. I don’t go visit.”
He mindlessly followed her as she wandered through the woods, following no definite path, stopping to soak in the sun when the clouds cleared, kicking twigs, picking berries which she ate and offered, all the while talking. Greg found it funny, that trait about the people around here, like they see a new face and need to relay their life story in order to get acquainted. But she spared him the details, and seemed to hold little regard for facts. She pointed out her friends of the forest, the hollow tree she called her treehouse, a shrub she called the deer plant because its branches looked like antlers. When he gave her the correct name, or shared any, what most people would consider, useful information, she failed to find it interesting, correcting him instead by ending with, “Well, I call it the deer plant because its branches look like antlers.”
Greg found the world through her eyes so simply fascinating he stopped steering away from these fabrications. He had some difficulty following her reasoning at times, she referred to things using her pet names for them, not stopping to explain that ‘cappy’ referred to the large granite boulder they passed, or ‘flickamediddle’ stood for the seed pods with wings that helicoptered down from trees and a slight lisp in her speech disguised certain familiar words. All of this combined to make her adorable, so different from the farm girls he knew, all thick boned and clear-skinned with shiny white teeth. They all resembled farm animals, either muscular like horses or round like hogs. If he had to pick one farm animal this girl might look like it could have been a rooster, but even that was a stretch, she looked like the woods, with a knobby trunk and twiggy limbs, her long strawberry blonde hair lay limp in spindly strands along her arms and chest like the creeks that crossed the mountains. She had a straight nose like the ribs of bark and thin lips, and with all that angularity her eyes shone out so much more splendid, her huge round brown eyes, absorbing everything and noticing nothing as she passed them by. He sheepishly asked her name, and she answered Wendy, in a ‘duh, how come you don’t know that’ tone, leaving him questioning if he had already broached that topic. Perhaps that explained why she hadn’t asked him in return. Maybe he told her, lost in the trance of her eyes because when she turned them to him he felt choked for words.
Likewise it occurred to him that he knew not where she had led him. The forest, like the ocean, can always appear perilously familiar, so breaking from her spell for a moment he asked if she had a destination. She seemed not to understand the question. They had followed the creek to the cliff and then she had cut away from his property, continuing north. He mentioned that they had walked so long they would hit the street soon. She asked, “Which street?”
“The one that leads to Sage Springs.”
She furrowed her brow. “But which one?”
Now Greg was perplexed. “I thought there was only one.”
“What!” She said, “There’s tons of them.”
“Really, where?”
“All over, we passed some of them before.”
He had seen nothing, and again, attributed it to the fact that he had followed her, traipsing through her world without registering the landmarks he would recognize. He rephrased his question.
“Is this your land?”
“Yeah,” she said. When he asked how much property her family owned she said, “all of it.” He assumed she meant the hillside.
“Has your family been here long?”
“As long as I know.”
“You said your grandparents are here?”
“Grandma, yes, I didn’t know my grandpa but they say he was a famous explorer.”
“What did he explore?”
“Here. Before there were people here they came out in the wagons. I have a book on it.”
“You mean the pioneers.”
“Yeah.”
Nellie never believed in deluding her children with fantasy to protect them from cruel truths, and Greg wondered if his life’s outlook would have differed if she had told him that his father died in an expedition to the North Pole rather than pointing out that he preferred women with every other hair color than hers. Consumed with this thought he let the subject drop just when she said, “look, I’ll show you,” and cut a sharp right around the bend, over a fallen log, through some tight bramble bushes and broke suddenly into a clearing.
A ramshackle house, two storey, with a number of additions snaking out from the rear of it, stood in the center. A number of other structures, what Greg assumed to be sheds and barns, formed the perimeter. The space between, covered in matted tufts of grass, was littered with a number of random items, many of them children’s toys, a tricycle, a ball, others were working implements like random mechanical equipment, shovels and tarps. He could see the hoods of a couple cars peeking out from behind the house and though everything appeared out of place, the four birdbaths on the property struck him as especially odd in a homestead that, on first glance, eschewed anything else ornamental. However, as he trailed behind her, he observed that the house had shutters, and a porch with an oriental-looking rug hung on the railing.
“I told you NO!” a woman’s voice scolded to his right, followed by the wail of a child. He caught movement in what he had pegged as a shed, but now began to reconsider sighting faded curtains in the window. Again, the instinct of occupancy he had learned to ignore returned, and he became aware of two men standing at the back of the house. One called something to Wendy as she passed and ducked into another shed/abode. He yelled at her again but Greg, who had now slowed to a crawl, couldn’t catch what he said. The man moved towards the shed saying something again and she stuck out her head, replied and disappeared again. The man now started towards Greg.
He recognized the resemblance immediately, and though instantly intimidated, he felt reassured when he assessed that he was taller than her father. Like his daughter his age seemed indeterminate, could have been slightly older than Ray or a lot older than Ray, he had a grizzly beard donned by many of the locals and wore a faded cap on his head so any wrinkles Greg could spy creased around his eyes.
“You moved into one of the logger’s properties,” the man said with familiarity, eschewing introduction and cutting right to conversation.
“About a year ago, yes,” he said.
“You fixing to live it or log it?”
“Not my choice. I’m helping my cousin set up house. He always wanted to retire in the mountains.”
“And you?”
“I’m seeing if I like it for now. It’ll take a few winters to decide.” He smiled. Nellie had always reminded him to smile more; she said people always thought his face looked mad until he smiled.
The man momentarily returned the expression, and then continued his query, “So it’s just you and your cousin over there.”
“Yes sir.”
“Is the rest of his family coming to join him once you set up house?”
“Oh, we all hope not, there’s quite a clan back home, but everyone likes to get away now and then so we may have ourselves some visitors now and again.”
The man nodded and continued to stare at him as if waiting for him to continue, so he resorted to formalities and introduced himself. The man called himself ‘Brock’.
“I ran into Wendy on a walk and she told me that your family goes way back in these woods.”
“We settled this area,” he partially confirmed her claim. “We had this whole mountain before the people came to try to make a town out of it, and then they brought in the loggers to try to keep that lie alive. Nobody asked us anything but to move but we stood what ground we could and we’re still here, and we’ll be here after everyone else is gone.”
“How many acres do you have?”
What to Greg amounted to common farmer’s small talk struck Brock as unseemly. He took two steps back, spread his arms wide and answered, “all of it, was, is and will be again.” Then he smiled smugly, crossing his arms over his chest with a ‘what do you think of that?’ expression.
“Well, we’ll try our best to be good neighbors,” Greg responded, noticing Wendy in the distance showing something in her hand to the man Brock was just talking to. She turned as if feeling Greg’s eyes on her and waved and then energetically continued explaining something to the guy who laughed. Brock was nodding, still in his stance. “Well, good to meet you, let me know if we can be of any help,” he said backing up.
“Will do,” Brock answered.
Greg gave a wave to Wendy and the man returned it.
He had no other compass but to head south and hope he would run into something he recognized before the light ran out. At first he found himself stopping every few steps, arrested to the sound of what he thought were her footsteps behind him. He even hid behind a rock for a moment and then sprung out to find nothing but the sway of the forest. Though alone, the knowledge of their hidden homestead reassured him. He felt less alone grappling over the rocks he never recognized on the way here, and it seemed no long hike before he came to the creek where they met.
Greg burst into to their sparse but clean house quivering with the same electricity of discovery with which he approached Ray with their first nugget, and he explained the encounter exuberantly from the doorway while Ray stored away all the Sage Springs goods he had piled on the center table. When he finished Ray poured them both some water, took his to the table, and sat down. “So, what do you propose we do about this?” He said.
The heat from the sinking sun suddenly burned through the back of Greg’s shirt, and he stepped from the doorway. “Well, maybe we can both go up there to introduce you…”
Ray’s glance cut him off. “They’re going to question what we’re doing here,” he said, kicking back his chair and peering out the window. “You said you thought someone was following you home?”
“No, I was just hearing things,” Greg said. Wishful thinking, Greg thought.
“No bother, they know where we are.” Ray said.
“Half the town knows we’re here,” Greg pointed out.
“We just need to act a little more like campers and leave no trace,” Ray said.
On the next trip Greg opted to return with Ray to Sage Springs. Ray didn’t want him doing any dredging without the equipment they were to pick up. Greg told him how the girl had mentioned the other roads running through the mountains, and though they scanned the woods for any ruts that may indicate an intersection, neither saw a thing.
Months had passed since Greg last stepped foot in Sage Springs, and the resort season had hit its peak, but though perfectly tanned, massaged and manicured women traipsed by smelling of eucalyptus and lavender, Greg could only think of Wendy with her tangled hair and bruised knees. She had half moons of grit collected under her fingernails, which he only noticed when she showed him the scab she got on her elbow from crawling into the end of a cave she pointed out as they passed by.
Ray took him first to the bank, where he handed Greg $500 in cash. He used $200 to start a savings account and spent another $100 on living supplies, food he liked but Ray didn’t. Ray spent another $500 on disguising supplies, traps, and locks. He proposed using a portable shed to hide the dredging equipment, and purchased some breathing apparatus so they could stay underwater longer and not constantly bob up and down.
“Since it looks like they’re upstream we don’t need to worry too much about hiding the sediment for now, but we should think of that in the future,” Ray said in the car heading back.
Greg regretted relaying his entire encounter to his friend. He would have kept his find secret if he knew the paranoia it would stir. He found the locks and traps, which only sounded a siren if tripped, offensive to what he hoped might be a new acquaintance. He feared that more than the implications of Ray’s suspicions, which he considered completely unfounded. If she had been watching him, waiting for the day they would meet, what would she think now that she noticed new security on their house? And just as he thought this, staring blankly at the trees on the drive home as they scaled the summit of one hump in the mountain chain he saw Wendy, seated on the hood of the junker Jeep he spied behind her house the other day.
By the time Greg convinced Ray to stop they had gone over the top, and Ray argued that it would be unsafe to reverse the truck backwards with no visibility, especially if they knew they shared the road, so they made an awkward K- turn and headed back slowly so as not to miss the road that escaped them enough times already.
“OK, I noticed that low bough before you called out,” Ray said after a few minutes.
So did Greg. They K-turned again and chugged up the hill once more, now even slower, and just before the summit he grabbed Ray’s shoulder to stop. Under the copse of a clearing only large enough for a Jeep but not their truck, he spied two wheel divots. He jumped out with the truck barely stopped. The road wasn’t more than a horse trail, but the presence of cracked saplings and trampled brush indicated something larger had passed through recently. The wind whipped around this area though, disguising any sound.
Ray agreed that someone could, if needed, try to off-road through there, but he wouldn’t risk the health of their one truck on such an endeavor. And he didn’t know anyone who would, he added, which, like the traps and the locks struck Greg as disrespectful, enough to say so.
“You know you have yet to meet these people,” Greg said back in the passenger’s seat, “why don’t you reserve judgment for that time?”
Ray was silent for awhile, and then finally said, “I don’t want anyone knowing about the potential of our plot, especially anyone geographically close to it.”
“You know what it sounded like to me, it sounded like these are real true settlers, people who came and settled in a place looking for a better life, only to get it stolen by these rich resort and logging people. He still considers it his mountain, and he was here first, so we need to be careful to respect that,” Greg spouted out all that had weighed in his mind since the first security discussion.
“It does sound like he considers it his mountain, but the only fact I know to be true is that I purchased a deed of land which I validated as a legit deal. The one and only landowner on our land ever as far as I know and the records state was the logging company. I have my money sunk into it and I’m going to protect that investment…and the dream we came up here to follow.” He made sure to catch Greg’s eye during the last statement.
Ray snored, loudly, which never failed to keep Greg awake. The only strategy he found effective was to fall asleep first, but that had become difficult. Strange, he thought to himself, how Ray was so paranoid during the day, pushing him to lay their traps before dark, and to close the curtains so the light of their lamps didn’t create a beacon of their cabin through the trees, yet he drifted to slumber within seconds of hitting the cot, leaving Greg who worried less about such things, stuck with this chainsaw roaring out of the adjoining room. Stranger still, through the din of his snore’s echo through the naked walls of their cabin, he still thought he caught the sound of something crack outside. Sensitive to the idea that Wendy or one of her family members might trip the siren, Greg sprung to the back window to find, as he pulled the curtain aside, that the full moon had illuminated the forest brighter than any lantern they had within. Everything glistened with the silver lunar light, still and peaceful. He crept over to the front window, and then checked the side next to Ray’s room, through which he could see little. As Greg re-entered his room, he thought he caught the flicker of a candle deep in the woods, off in the direction of the creek, which extinguished the moment he stepped across the transom. One step backwards returned it to view. Greg stood there for a good few minutes, blinking his eyes to affirm the reality of his sight. It never wavered, the little yellow diamond of light cut through the silver moon forest like a star in the night sky.
Greg had learned that it paid to investigate, and careful not to trip one of his own traps, he set out on the path he knew even when obstacles hid the little candle tip he sought through the darkness. He headed towards the creek, then followed it up to where he could hear the waterfall where he had met Wendy, and though he expected to see the halo of a lantern expand as he approached he fought his way through the dark canopy, tripping over the underbrush that lined the trail he couldn’t see, until he came around a large tree to the clearing of his destination, but instead of finding a light burning, and/or the presence of his friend clothed or no, he found instead an equally beautiful sight.
The moon shone like a sunbeam through the trees, so much so that the creek sparkled as if filled with a million diamonds. The waterfall, so small and noble as it was, barely taller than Wendy, burst forth from the blackness of the outcropping above spilling the full spectrum of pastel shades like a dancing rainbow in the moonlight. He had never seen anything to spectacular, as a rainbow sends color from the grey clouds so this moon-bow revealed the gifts hidden deep in the night.
Greg found that standing in the middle of the creek gave him the best show, and he knew not how long he stood there when suddenly the chill of the first fall breeze blew in, and a bough of a tree wiggled over the moon face, and for a moment the light dimmed slightly, and the reds and blues and greens faded, and in that moment flashed the candle flame behind the waterfall. He lunged towards it, and just as quickly lost it again to the mist. Yet he had fixed it in his gaze and tromped through the water towards where he sensed it to be, trudging up the mud of the bank and then into the waterfall pool until he could feel the colors splatter on his face. Without hesitation, he plunged through the moon bow.
He stepped through with his hands extended expecting to walk into rock, but was met with the damp breath of a cave instead. When he opened his eyes the ‘flame’ appeared in arm’s reach now, but with each step closer it retreated, and then disappeared into blackness. Greg’s own shadow had engulfed it. He turned sideways to let the moonlight in and, now facing the stone wall, espied another, smaller candlelight, and then another.
The moonlight, so silver and bright, exposed the gold that flickered yellow like little flames of candlelight in the cave.
Sleep became the thing of dreams as dreams entered his daytime. Greg spent the night in the cave, which he found dwindled down into a book’s-width gap a half a mile past the watery entrance. Not the arched tunnel cave of illustrations, the top and north side consisted of the gold-veined wet rock, whereas the south side was comprised of a group of older harder boulders jutted up against it and going nowhere as the north side dissolved into the stream. It ended with a bunch of boulders which emitted the breath of the earth behind, as if another cave waited for another thousand years to reveal its wealth.
Greg made no plans for the cave; no interior monologue plotted his intentions. Instead he returned home to find Ray still asleep and poured himself some cereal. When Ray came to and started talking about which river segment he wanted to concentrate on, Greg crunched his flakes, nodded, and followed the directions as given. He worked well that day, they laughed together when Greg slipped on a slug, they celebrated the gold leaf they found with some cookies Greg had purchased in Sage Springs, and bedded down wishing each other a good night. And the week passed like any other.
Greg didn’t feel guilty until a washer burst on their equipment and Ray volunteered to run into town to buy a replacement. He fumbled with suiting up Ray’s gear until the sound of his truck faded down the hill, and then he dropped the equipment on the bank of the river and headed for the trailer which had become the tool shed, grabbed a screwdriver and a hammer, and then made straight for the creek. After what seemed like forever picking at the one little candle flame he found the evening of the week before, Greg realized that he needed a few things, one, a watch to estimate when Ray would return, two, better equipment for dry mining (as opposed to sifting the river bottom,) and three, the darkness. He wondered how far the clink of his picking, however effective, could be heard and the paranoia of points one and three pulled him from his pursuit.
Greg’s brothers used to joke that he possessed a sixth sense when it came to his mother. The boys would hold up in the barn when all their work was done, knowing well that if their mother caught them slacking off she would find a new chore for them. Greg would always somehow know when she lurked nearby, and rustle up his brothers to grab a rake and make it look like they were working. He had a similar premonition in the cave, and stashed his picking equipment in the ‘book nook’ at the far end before he grappled out to the sunlight.
Wearing only his trunks, as he had left dredging in that state before, he rinsed himself off in the waterfall, and forded the creek to the south bank headed home when he heard a whistle from above and saw Wendy high up a few yards away straddling a tree bough. “Hey stranger,” she said giddily swinging her legs, “Now I caught you washing.”
Greg waved.
“It’d help if you lost the shorts,” she called.
“Your dad wouldn’t like you talking to strangers that way,” Greg said.
She giggled, and laid her front down on the bough, hugging it horizontally with both her arms and legs.
Greg was glad he was wearing shorts then. He turned to go, afraid of what Ray would say if he caught him wasting daylight this way, but then something occurred to him and he swerved back around. “Does one of your brothers have a green Jeep,” he asked.
She looked at him blankly, “No.”
“I thought I saw you on the north road the other day.”
“Did you say Hi?”
“No, you were gone when we came back.”
“I come down here a lot.”
“When do you come here?”
She bit her lower lip, “When I want to.”
“Any specific time of day?”
“I guess later, like now, to wash up.”
“Maybe I’ll see you here again soon,” he said backing away.
“Where are you going,” she asked, straightening up.
“I need to help my friend coming back from the store.” He realized as he left, that he told her that Ray was his cousin before, but he shook away his worries in a moment. She didn’t seem bright enough to catch that.
Ray arrived home around sunset as Greg packed up their equipment for the night. Greg had worked up a good deal of resentment against his friend in that time, reflecting on how Ray always left Greg to do the work as he flitted about town socializing with the locals. How long did it take to get a washer? Greg gave himself more than enough excuses to hide his cave discovery from Ray, and now that he allowed himself to think seriously about his find, he knew he had to strategize a way to chip away at his own future, away from Ray’s yoke.
Hungry, Greg stewed over how Ray only purchased canned food. They had fresh meat only the first day or two after a shopping trip because they only had so much room in the cooler. Greg liked sandwiches, fruit, cereal, and cookies, but only had a chance to buy them with his own money when Ray would let him come to the store, which he rarely did because he wanted one of them working all the time. Ray worried that any pantry would attract animals, and wouldn’t purchase anything that would sit out to tempt them, and wouldn’t purchase a separate closed container to store such things that didn’t need refrigeration.
Greg thought about the trailer full of clutter in the first clearing, and after a dinner of chili, again, took a lantern with an innocent excuse that he wanted to close up his cookies in the small refrigerator, long unplugged, inside. But once he got there he started cleaning, arranging his new home.
He used the excuse that Ray’s snoring bothered him, and that he didn’t mind staying in the trailer. It gave him the freedom to come and go without questions, which, as the fall descended and the dark portions of the day extended became easier. He worked in the early mornings and, after dinner in the cabin with Ray, made the motions to go home when really he went to work for a few hours.
In one week he chipped out a nugget larger than everything they found in the river combined, and he found his vein that extended into the cave. That week when Ray went to Sage Springs, he waited by the waterfall. When she had yet to arrive at dusk he went to find her. They met coming around the boulder that hid her house, and she ran into his arms.
It was like a movie. Neither said anything yet it felt so right. She smelled like campfire. Later he showed her the way to his trailer, and warned her not to get to close to the house by the river, as his cousin would shoot any trespassers.
“That’s not very nice,” she said.
“He’s not very nice,” Greg said, and warned her to stay away from him.
Though he tried to set a schedule to meet at the waterfall at a certain time she would never obey, and would randomly show up at his trailer. Sometimes he would find her there in the middle of the day, laying on his bed or going through his things with the curiosity of a kitten. Sometimes she would appear in the middle of the night. She was always hungry so he made sure he had food in there for her.
Greg found himself making house. He arranged the place for her, started making the long trip to the grocery at Sunny Springs, where he purchased his own provisions. Ray started giving him more of his share, since they were no longer splitting the grocery bill and Greg stocked the trailer with junk food he knew she would like. He would admire her scarfing down an entire sleeve of cookies, shedding crumbs all over his bed. She cared little for cleanliness, so he would find himself tossing out her trash and laundering things when she was away, preparing himself for the next whirlwind visit. As for Ray, they had reduced their interaction to work only, which, with the waning days, grew shorter. But with Wendy’s unexpected visits becoming more frequent, Greg was getting little work done in the cave. He still hid his tools from her as well, though as they talked of nonsense in the moonlight, he started feeding her hints.
One day at the end of October it snowed while they were at work, and both men stood up in their wetsuits and called the season quits. Ray then asked Greg to join him in the house, which Greg had worked so hard to build but no longer considered his residence, to celebrate the season over a bottle of Johnny Walker. They spread the nuggets they had collected on the table and began to discuss plans for the sale. Maybe it was the whisky, maybe the prospect of the long, cold vacation ahead, but the company was so welcome the two old friends talked well into the night, finishing off the bottle in the process.
When Greg stumbled back to the trailer he found it only five hundred degrees with Wendy laying on his bed. She sat bolt up when he approached her, and seemed irritated for once. He knew his propane was running low though, so he ignored her attitude and cut it out, and started rummaging through his mini-fridge for the last of the ham that he knew was all he had left to eat when he saw the empty cheese wrapper on the floor and the bread open on the counter half mauled. He always thought of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale when he cleaned up her food mess, and called it ‘the trails of Wendy,’ when he came home to find such evidence but somehow now, Ray, who had annoyed him for so long, seemed a welcome friend and his little sprite’s games had become tiresome.
“Did you see the ham in here?” he asked.
She stood up and started towards the door. He reached for her arm.
“I didn’t know you did hooch!” she yelled in his ear.
“What?”
“Hooch, I don’t like hooch!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Liar!” she yelled, “I can smell it on you.”
“Oh you mean drinking? I don’t that much, we were just celebrating the end of the season,” he hinted as usual, knowing she wouldn’t probe.
“I can go other places if you want to do that,” she said and left.
He let her. Greg was not one to sustain an argument. He avoided them instead, and diverted his energy to cleaning up her breadcrumbs. He picked up the cheese wrapper and when he went to throw it in the trash he found his ham, open, with a few bites taken out of a piece, on the floor beside it, and his heart softened. He imagined Wendy finding it and taking a few bites, and when she didn’t like something, she tossed it aside as if it was something of no use to anyone.
The next morning, Greg answered a knock on his door he knew to be Ray, because Wendy never knocked. “Did you hear anything strange out here last night?” Ray asked.
“I don’t know, passed plumb out,” Greg answered.
“I would have, but was busy playing with our booty, which, dammit, I should have put away because I looked up and there was someone in the window.”
Greg’s heart jumped, for fear that Ray would take action against Wendy and not for any other reason.
“Well, I think we shouldn’t put off that road trip any longer. We need to cash out now.”
Greg then played a strange dual tactic that proved counterproductive to both goals. He didn’t approach the subject of who Ray saw at the window, but still emphasized that they needed to secure their home from being plundered while away, and successfully rationalized that their initial investment was valuable enough to take a couple days to fortify right.
When Wendy didn’t return by nightfall, he went to the cave and worked until daylight straining his ears for the sound of a snapped twig. It awoke him in the morning, but only in the form of a foal, and with a remorseful heart he filled his pockets with the little he had chipped away and departed.
He blamed a coming cold for his lethargy that day, and after he and Ray wrapped up setting their traps and stashing their goods by noon he headed to bed to rest, promising not to delay their departure at 5am the following morning. He slept six hours, and emerging to find Ray’s truck gone, snuck off to find Wendy. First he stopped at the cave and smeared with oil and mud the gold streak he had exposed to tarnish the shine just in case someone got curious.
After wandering around Wendy’s usual haunts for awhile he stopped at the boulder that marked the edge of their homestead. He wagered whether her father would appreciate his honesty if he had come calling for her, and decided in his mind that it was the right thing to do when he heard the sound of an engine, approaching like a bulldozer through the woods knocking down all in its way. He crouched between a boulder and a bush, praying against being trampled when the sound from the east hooked north and entered the compound. Fumbling through the bush he could, concealed, see the events in the clearing.
Two men that he had assumed to be Wendy’s brothers, had driven the jeep he recognized from that glimpse on the road, right into the center of the mudfest in the family’s territory, and were busy unloading some bundles from it. The man of the house then appeared and though Greg could heard them speaking he could only make out a few words, one of which was Wendy, coming in a questioning tone from her father. One man shook his head. The other mouthed the word ‘no.’ Greg took comfort in the fact that her father acted unconcerned by the answer. The one who had given the head shake then gestured in the direction behind him, and said what Greg construed as the name ‘Darcy’. Now the father shook his head and turned his attention to the stuff in the backseat of the Jeep. Greg crept away, somewhat relieved to know that Darcy was the name of Wendy’s mother. The next morning Greg left the trailer unlocked with a note for Wendy explaining how he had to join his cousin in Reno, and would return in a week.
He knew of no way around it. In order to sell his own finds, separate of Ray, he needed to understand the process firsthand, and fortified his heart with the thought that it would be she who lost out if she held such a grudge for so long.
That resolve weakened in Reno, with all the city women tramping around like Barbie dolls in comparison, with painted fingers and lips, all fake, no one as natural and pure as his Wendy of the woods. He found the lack of distraction allowed him to focus entirely on business, and even Ray commented on how quickly Greg gaged the game. Ray had done some research. He learned that the jewelry store he had initially sold their first gold to in Sage Springs, actually sold it for more to an actual buyer in Reno, and Ray wanted to get the best price for his hard work. At first, the store in the referral appeared like any other, perhaps smaller than some, but their opinion quickly changed when Ray reached for the door handle and found it locked, even though they spied customers engaging in transactions behind the glass. They stood dumb for a moment. Then a vampish woman looked up and at noticing them, her hand disappeared under the cabinet and the door emitted a buzz. She scoffed at his proposal to sell gold, but a glance to a corner office led Ray to insist that they should be interested. The woman didn’t deign to answer but walked her way slowly to the said corner office. They only followed her when she returned directing them to do so.
Greg found the whole transaction distasteful. It reminded him of the cattle markets. He expected a more dignified procedure, and told Ray so after they left.
“The guy plays a good game, but I still got a better rate,” said Ray.
Greg recommended they spend the rest of the day casing some other places, for next time.
Ray welcomed him to do so, he was tired and ready to head back to the hotel. He had talked all the way down about hitting the town when they cashed out. He wasn’t much for gambling, but after years of dreaming of the solitude of a cabin in the woods, the lack of interaction had begun to inspire big city reveries. They had found a hotel central to a number of shops Ray had mentioned, but when he got a good deal on his favorite he opted to head home, so Greg went into the second most decent, only two storefronts down. Run by two friendly and far less intimidating guys he scored a decent transaction with the least attitude and hassle, and emerged with a good return for his cave find, maybe not optimum but decent, and certainly worth the ease.
Ray planned to spend three nights there, but Greg wanted to get his goods and get out and only committed to two, which turned out to be just enough time for him to buy a truck of his own, some home comforts for the trailer, and supplies for the cave. Ray dragged him out to the town at night, but neither quite knew what to do in it. Back on the farm the usual Saturday nights centered more around socializing with familiar faces, and in Sunny Springs they had stopped into Phil’s place for reconnaissance early on but not, for Greg at least, since the season started. A busy city bar full of strangers set on enjoying themselves demanded behaviors the two had only observed in movies. As they sat and sipped their beers at a place that Ray insisted they visit because it looked like girls might go there both realized that they had a decent amount of money and lots of time on their hands.
“I’m thinking of traveling around a bit, no need to sit there freezing to death,” Ray announced suddenly. He talked about taking the winter off and traveling until spring. Greg finally had the interest to ask where “I want to see California, and maybe swing by home.”
Ray had a PO Box in Sunny Springs and had corresponded with home for some time. Since they had disappeared the same day, naturally everyone asked if Ray had Greg with him. Greg had Ray say that he gave his friend a ride to Reno where they parted ways.
They spent their spare time in Reno ironing out plans and not mingling much so Ray left after the second day as well. They came home to a few inches of snow and flurries falling. After a week back in the mountains, Ray made off on his journey.