As he watched, a dark angel came through the light
after him. . . . ‘I have loved you, Lord,’ he thought.
He wanted to get it on the record.
   —Pete Dexter, Deadwood

THE OLD man could see the newspaper outside, on the other side of the porch, where the paperboy had missed. The Spokane newspaper was always a day late out in the Valley—but why did it have to be out of reach today, when his picture was in the paper?

The ground moved under him when he went outside. Forever after, that’s what he remembered about his fall. He turned the radio on and then he stepped outside the front door. When he let go of the railing and moved his feet onto the concrete steps, everything moved at once. The railing came rushing past and then he was on the pavement, a smear of thin blood on his wrist and on his temple, a throbbing filling his head.

Far away, from inside the house, he could hear the radio. “It’s in God’s own words,” said the radio. “We can clearly see that God owns us. This passage marks us all as God’s own property, God’s own loved ones—‘Oh Lord, you know me, you know all my ways.’” It was J. Vernon McGee on the radio. He listened to J. Vernon every day.

The voice rose and fell. “You know when I sit and when I lie down, you knew me in my mother’s womb.” The old man moved his head slowly from side to side. His head seemed all right, but he couldn’t put weight on his wrist. His arm trembled, holding him up.

Kev ran a hand over the bristles on his head. Unwashed for a week now, they had turned into greasy spikes. And his tattoo was beginning to itch anew under a layer of bug bites.

But all that insurgency training at the Aryan Nations had paid off for him. It hadn’t taken a lot to find the fuckin’ bastard—Kev just checked on the spots where he himself would have hidden if he were trying to beat a rap. And at the old Route 95 firepit, he could see that the guy had just left.

For nearly a week, he’d been close, their paths crossing here and there. Sometimes he knew he was close, and sometimes he convinced himself that the trail was cold as hell. But he hadn’t given up. Kev couldn’t shake the sense that somehow, they were connected.

At the St. Joe waterhead, he finally saw the yellow blanket from the bus, the one left behind. It was like a signal to Kev, waiting for him on the porch of a backwoods cabin—one you could only get to by boat, or by traipsing through the woods. When Kev saw the little dock and the cabin with the yellow blanket rolled up on the porch, he froze.

Finally, when a squirrel ran up the doorframe and began to chew on the gutter, Kev was sure the cabin was unoccupied. No one was there.

Inside the cabin, Kev replenished his supplies. He found a bottle of liquor, an unopened bag of potato chips, and batteries for his music.

He still had a bunch of shit he’d hauled away from the car, it slowed him down. He threw it all in the lake that afternoon.

Children’s things. Books, toys. A doll. It landed far out in the water. He looked at the cross—but then he put it back in his pocket. He couldn’t let go of Arlen’s cross yet. He finished the rest of the liquor in one long swallow. Then he lifted the bottle into the air, an underhand toss. He did not watch it strike the water.

Afterward, in the darkness of the cabin, he waited for the tattooed man to return.

The old man pushed himself off the ground until he was sitting close enough to the paper to reach it. He looked at it. Right on the front, there he was, twenty-five years ago. “Mining Memories: Heroes and Heartbreak” said the headline. Under his picture was his name, printed in big, bold letters: Stan Worthson.

Stan’s wrist ached now with the effort of reaching out for the paper. The tinny whisper of the radio was there with him. “Now a door stood open in heaven, and a voice like a trumpet spoke to John, saying, ‘Come hither, and I will show you hereafter.’”

He considered crawling in the front door. But he could already see his neighbor looking out from between her curtains. He had to get inside before the busybody called anyone, told anyone he was too weak to take care of himself.

His wrist felt as if it was on fire. He glanced at the steps, and was surprised to see blood glimmering there. The railing had scraped him open as he fell. He held on to his wrist with his other hand, thinking that would help.

He thought for a time, watching the light drain out of the sky. The evening was passing him by. He looked at the wide acre of the backyard, at the shed halfway down the yard. It leaned to one side. He thought if he lay here long enough, the rats who had overrun the shed would take an interest in him. He took his hand off his wrist and looked down again, he thought the bleeding had lessened now.

He heard something inside, the faint sound of the radio Bible verses: “The river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowed down forever . . . On each side of the river stood a tree of life . . . and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Stan looked up at the white pine tree that shadowed the porch. He wondered what a tree of life looked like. A breeze blew through the trees, all the branches moved together, as if the mountain itself was in motion. He remembered thinking about the trees of life when he was mining too. On the outside he would be covered in dust and grime, and on the inside he would be full of the light and life of heaven.

He held on to his wrist, feeling the fire fade there under his grip. In the failing light, he couldn’t read the story in the paper, but he thought of the Sunshine Mine, the miners dead around him, in the collapsed drifts. Dead miners, holding their lunches in their hands.

Now the miners were all around him again, holding hard hats in their hands. The miners’ union prayer meetings before work seemed so near to him. He looked at his hands. The searing burn of the pain in his wrist washed through. Every time it faded away, he drifted into the past. All around him he could see the dust, the wrinkles in the miners’ faces, the worn leather gloves. The miners were waiting for him to open the meeting with prayer. Gently, Stan Worthson put his head down on the concrete steps.

There were moments in Kev’s head that never really went away. The past was always behind everything he saw, a vertiginous afterimage that moved beneath the present. It burned in, scarring him like a brand.

The pot he had managed to score over the past few weeks had only blurred the movies in his head. They didn’t make that August night go away. Sleep brought all of it to the surface, the memories bright enough to burn anew.

He remembered the man sleeping next to him, Father Arlen. How helpless the little man looked, the cross floating out of his collar, the beard on his chin uneven. Yet he slept in an untroubled way, a naïve child.

The priest had an odd kind of surety, a strength that wasn’t connected to any reality Kev knew. Maybe the peace Arlen showed in his sleep came out of that same unreal place. Kev stopped thinking about it then though. He remembered standing up, picking up his bag with his Walkman inside. Always, in his memory, he turned, and the little girl caught his eye.

She moved sideways through the station, her pale dress like a coin dropped in a well of water, flickering uncertainly as it dropped across his vision. There were other children in the station, but she stood out, locked as she was to the wrist of the large man with the tattoos.

She toddled along on her tiptoes, pulled by his grip. Kev saw that she was too tired to keep her eyes open, but she didn’t want to fall asleep. Maybe not in the Greyhound station, maybe not with that man. Watching her struggle to stay awake, he saw there was a similarity between her and the little priest beside him. She had the same trust in her, it was written all over her face.

Kev remembered watching the man beside her, his protuberant eyes scanning the station, taking in each person, evaluating them, discarding them. Then the man glanced up at the window, at Kev staring back at him.

Even now, Kev’s pulse beat faster at the memory. Those damn eyes would look that way at a piece of machinery he’d bought. The bastard thought he could take him!

When the man looked away, Kev could feel the speed in his veins turn a corner and accelerate. He’d thought at first he needed a reason—that the girl gave him that reason. But then he realized that he didn’t need a reason at all. A look was enough.

Kev had decided, then and there, that he would take out the tattooed man. Here he was, still moving from that moment of decision, a ball hit by a cue. He waited in the cabin, trembling still with pent-up rage. He waited for the man to come back and die.

As the blood leached out of Stan Worthson’s arm, he sank away from the pain. He sank into the past, back into the mine. The mineshaft he was in had a touch of bad air—you could taste the sourness in the stale tunnels. It was far away from any of the modern ventilation holes. This was where they were supposed to put the files. Deep into some mined-out stope, where they could cover the boxes of paper with tons of fill sand in a matter of minutes. All around them were the marks of ancient dynamite and the distant echo of air blasts from the lower depths. It felt like a place that had been utterly abandoned.

They didn’t find out for weeks that they were in the wrong tunnel.

He remembered, too, the second time they visited that isolated drift over at the 910 raise. There was a muck slusher sitting there that time, a big old steel bucket, dragging sand and stone back out of the hole. There was good old Larry Clark working away, dust billowing out of the drift in a cloud against the spotlights he’d rigged, veins of ore glistening in the rock. The stope hadn’t been mined out, after all. And along with the ore and dead rock, there were reams of paper tumbling out of the hole in the drift, every move of the muck slusher pulled more of them into the passageway.

He didn’t notice at first when smoke started to creep invisibly into the raise where he was working. It was a thin, gray, seething carpet, creeping all across the ceilings of the mineways and the stopes, smelling of coal and cordite, a burn deep in the rock. If only they’d been able to cover the fire with sand as soon as the damn thing started.

In the first hour of the panic in the mine, he managed to find his partner. But his partner only cared about his own skin—about making sure no one knew he had a fake ID.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said. “You know this is just going to go from bad to worse. Get out while you still can.” But Stan couldn’t do that. He couldn’t just slip away. So he got everyone he could onto the overloaded hoists. He stayed in the mine, he kept working, until it was too late to get out.

Kev had fallen asleep while he waited for his target to return.

It was a tiny sound that woke him, a noise from the dock. He edged to a window.

A woman had floated into the boat dock, driving a little outboard boat. She put a box on top of the boards. Kev watched as the tattoed man jumped violently from the dock into the boat, his weight thrusting it away from the dock. Then he kicked the woman on the boat. The sweep of his leg carried most of his weight, it slammed her against the bulkhead.

After she was kicked the second time, across the shoulders, she fell against the dock and then into the water. She did not seem able to move her arm on the near side. The kick had broken something inside her.

As the woman fell, her hand grazed the box of papers on the dock, knocking it over. White paper spilled across the dock.

By the time Kev got to the water, the boat was floating out into the lake. The man moved again—Kev saw his tattooed arm yank in a sudden, violent motion—and Kev realized he was pulling at the choke. The thought came to him that the tattooed man did not know how to operate the boat. In that moment, Kev thought wildly of running out there, of jumping on the boat himself, tak ing the man down with him.

But then the outboard engine revved wildly and the boat leaped in the water, the red taillights blurred by the sleep still in Kev’s head. Pieces of paper covered the water nearby.

On the dock, the tattooed man had left something behind. A blackened knife. He picked it up, but then he dropped it again. He would leave that behind.

A shiver came over Kev at how fast the man had moved. He could not forget the smile on the man’s face, it had never gone away. And the bastard had slipped away again.

The woman staggered upright in the shallow water. Kev opened his mouth in surprise. She was alive. Her blouse was slick with water and with blood. Her arm hung loose by her side. He watched the water drip down off the woman in the lake, it fell from her face, her elbows, the tips of her fingers, sliding down off the ends of her skin.

Inside the ambulance, Stan felt himself rise to the surface for an instant. The air was thick and blurry, the hiss of a hose going down his throat sent cold air into him. Under the oxygen mask, he waited in a gray world of fog as the sirens sounded all around him.

With a jolt, he couldn’t breathe, and he was back in the drift, again. The smell was worse than anything he’d ever smelled underground. There was a seeping miasma of smoke, a stink in the mineway that was more profoundly wrong than the sharp reek of the burned body that came up from the stope. This time, they had packed the stope with sand until there was no way anything could ever come out again. But the nauseous smell of smoke still stayed in the passageway.

Smoke was the worst thing you could smell in a mine.

He knew it. His partner knew it. But the two of them couldn’t tell anyone, no one at all. So Stan kept working close to the surface, making sure there was an airhole above him, making sure that he’d get out okay, whatever happened.

He couldn’t believe the fire would have smoldered in the mine all this time. He thought it was just a nightmare. But when miners came through the manway, scared and desperate, looking for any self-rescue devices they could find, he knew that the dream had only begun to go bad.

Now he was back in the mineshaft all those years ago, trying desperately to find a ventilation shaft. Get me out, he screamed, Get me out. The smoldering air was all around him, no matter where he walked, it filled every shaft and raise he came to as he stumbled through the corridors hewn out of rock. Get me out. Death was close to him, it smelled like smoke, like an endless burning mine.

Kev reached down to the woman in the water. Her fingers groped across the dock, scrabbling for a knothole or a handle, for any kind of purchase. He didn’t understand why she didn’t simply take his hand until he saw that she was squinting desperately, fearfully. She’d lost her glasses. She didn’t know who he was.

“It’s okay, lady,” he said. “I’m not him. I saw you get knocked in the water.”

Then her hand felt cold in his grip, as if the blood had gone out of it. Her arm trembled as she pulled herself onto the dock, and he saw that her blouse had ripped open on a nail, her skin torn in a line. Feverishly she crawled forward, seeing the papers rising in the breeze, blowing across the water.

“My thesis,” she said. A piece of paper fluttered and caught against her temple. It hung there, bending in a gust of air, until Kev tore it away.

She rolled onto the dock, breathing heavily. It was then that Kev saw the metal frame glimmering on the wood by the water’s edge. Her glasses had fallen on the dock.

Kev looked back at her. Her eyes were closed. She breathed heavily, recovering her strength. He glanced back at the cabin. Once she got those thick glasses back on her eyes, she’d know what he looked like. He didn’t need that kind of grief.

While the woman caught her breath, Kev stepped silently off the dock, onto the porch of the cabin. Hell, it wasn’t his fault. The woman would live. And fuck it, he was done with this lame-ass chase. How was he supposed to get a boat?

An hour later he was able to pause and look back through the woods toward the distant cabin. Sirens were coming closer over the water, a battalion of police boats approaching. Seemed like the woman had found her glasses, gotten to a phone.

Far behind him, on the lake, the sun filled the water with light. In the center of that green reflection, a tiny glint was sharp as a knife, it held the sun quivering on the surface.

As Kev moved up the St. Joe River, the flicker stayed there. It was the brown-tinted liquor bottle, thrown into the lake hours before. It turned in the current, catching the light. The mouth of the bottle dipped up and down, filling slowly with water.

Stan Worthson woke in a different world. Nervously, he turned his head toward the dark, reflective window on his right. A white bandage covered the side of his head, obscuring his vision. He looked toward the left. A red bag with a dripping line ran under the sheets. Both of his arms hurt. He pulled the bandage away until he could see the matted red and the needles. It hurt when he pulled.

“Don’t touch that, don’t,” he heard Sally say, and he looked around toward the end of the bed and on the left. There were other people beside the bed, in the room with him.

He remembered a room like this one when he’d come out of the mineshaft. He remembered the people asking the questions, asking what had happened, why he’d survived, and so many hadn’t. Now the people would want to know why he was here, why he was in a hospital bed, but nothing in him knew. All he knew was the past.

“Where’s Matt?” he said. “I need to tell him something. It’s real important. Where’s my son, Matty?”

Hours after the ambulance left Stan Worthson’s house, Kev Macht crept into the yard. A single bulb flickered on the porch, but all the windows of the house were black.

By the time he reached the street, it was very late. He’d managed to hitchhike in to the Silver Valley, and then he’d had to make his way by foot up to the center of the Valley. Toward the end of the day, no one would pick him up anymore. He had to walk all the way to the town of Kellogg on his own.

Doug and Kev had spent many hours after school here together, away from everyone. He came to the place in the dark, his feet knew the way on their own. It was Pop Worthson’s house—Doug’s grandfather’s place. He waited in the shadows until past the sunset. Despite the hike up the Kellogg hill, he wanted to be sure no one was home.

Then Kev went to the side of the house and bent down toward the ground, feeling his way ahead with a hand outstretched. He knew the way. He didn’t want to end up colliding with the hulk of the old Barracuda, knocking himself out on the manifold.

Finally, he dropped to his knees and crawled along the ground where Doug and he had left the car. His fingers probed the ground. Any minute now, he thought, he’d touch the rounded edge of a tire, or feel the cold steel curve of the bumper against his face.

Kev could feel the ruts deeply scored in the driveway. A stench of spilled oil rose from the ground. Bits of rust from the undercarriage broke in his fingers and he stumbled on a gasket, fallen from the engine well. Then he found the side mirror, screws detached, lying where he and Doug had left it a year ago.

The mirror confirmed it for him. The car was gone. A tired ache filled his bones. He pushed himself into a sitting position and looked at the light on the porch.

Eventually, he went to the side of the house, where he knew there was a window with a broken latch. Inside the house, he didn’t turn on any lights. Instead, he stumbled to the kitchen. He ripped open all the cupboards and threw things on the floor, looking for something he wouldn’t have to cook. Finally, he found a piece of fruit in the cupboard, and a loaf of bread in the breadbox. He stuffed this in his mouth and left the rest.

On the back of the kitchen door, he found an army greatcoat. He took that with him too. He left the door unlocked. He might need a way back inside.

The yard was even darker than before. He paused, listening. It was filled with the rustling of night noises, the shriek of crickets, and the sounds of rats. Then he went into the familiar dark. On the other side of the yard, when he reached out, the shed door was exactly where he remembered. He pulled it closed behind him.

Inside, he curled up on a rotting feed bag and pulled the army coat over him. He adjusted the tiny headphones to his Walkman. Then he reached in his pocket and pushed the button. The music screeched in his ears. There was a scratching sound to his right. Rats. He turned the music up. Already he was cold on the ground. He had the yellow blanket now, but he was still cold. He’d have to steal a sleeping bag.

Kev Macht shivered for a moment. Then he was asleep.