All That Glitters
Sarah R. Shaber
I left my truck lights on, trained on the shack. The place was as desolate as ever. A shack cobbled together from logs and ragged boards, a rusty pick-up parked out front, the yawning mouth of a worthless mine a few yards away. And Dusty. Years ago, the old mule had passed away. The animal was too big to bury, so Zeke had piled rocks, dust and sand on his corpse. All that was left of him was skeleton with a few bones poking out of his makeshift grave.
“Hello the camp,” I called out. There was no answer.
I pulled my gun from its holster. I hated to. Zeke was an old, sick man, but the folks in town had said he was drunk and brandishing his shotgun, shouting about killing the imaginary outlaws he insisted were trying to steal his silver mine. As if anyone with any sense would want that barren hole in the ground. Just about as long as I could remember Zeke had insisted a bonanza of a silver strike was just days away and he’d die a rich man. There was sure no sign of it yet and he didn’t have many years left.
“Zeke,” I called out. “It’s Chief Jensen. Come on out. You know you got to.”
The shack door opened a few inches. “I’m nekkid,” Zeke answered. “Just give me a minute to put my trousers on.”
I holstered my gun and climbed out of the truck. He met me at the door to his shack carrying an old lantern and tucking a greasy shirt into a threadbare pair of trousers with his free hand. His bare feet were dirty and what grey hair he had stuck out around his ears.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I got to arrest you,” I said.
“Oh, hell. No you don’t.”
“Zeke, you threatened to shoot up the mercantile. And you were drunk. You scared the cashier nearly to death.”
“If the store had had them little Baby Ruths I like I wouldn’t have lost my temper. Come on, Mariah, you don’t need to take me in. You know I wouldn’t shoot nobody.”
“Go put your boots on. And don’t call me Mariah when I’m in uniform. It’s Chief Jensen.”
Grumbling, Zeke set down the lantern and went over to an unmade cot heaped with an old Indian blanket and a pillow that had never been washed. I could hear him mutter as he groped under the bed for his boots. “A woman policeman,” he said. “It ain’t natural. It just ain’t.” He found his weathered and cracked boots and struggled to pull them over his bare feet.
While I waited, I looked around his shack. How could someone live like this, I wondered. The dirt floor had been swept recently, but that was the extent of Zeke’s housekeeping. A pot-bellied stove that must have dated from the time of the Comstock stood in a corner. A cast-iron pot caked with cooked-on food rested on its single burner, while a crate of supplies sat on the floor nearby. An almost empty bottle of Four Roses whiskey rested on a three-legged table propped up on a stump.
Zeke’d lived like this as long as I could remember, bringing slivers of silver scraped out of his old mine into town to buy his simple needs. It was a common belief that Zeke had been driven plain crazy years ago, obsessed by silver fever. No one dared to approach his property without hollering first because the old man was sure claim jumpers were after his mine and he intended to shoot first and ask questions later. He needed a bath, a decent hot meal, clean clothes and a serious talking to. Which is why I’d driven all the way out here to arrest him.
Zeke jammed his battered felt derby on his head and followed me out to the truck. I wished I’d remembered to bring a blanket for him to sit on. His trousers were black with the charcoal he used to smelt his ore.
We followed the track from Zeke’s claim a couple of miles to where it met with the state road, guided by a line of rocks painted white picked out by my headlights. Once we got into town, I pulled up in front of the police station, a small white-washed stucco building with bars over all its windows and Police painted in black letters over the door.
“Where is everybody?” Zeke asked. “The whole damn town looks deserted. There ain’t no lights anywhere.”
“It’s the blackout, Zeke. Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?”
“The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. We’re at war now.”
I helped the old man down out of the truck. His arm felt like a stick of dry kindling.
“You’re ribbing me,” he said. “When did this happen? Where’s Pearl Harbor?”
“About three months ago. Pearl Harbor is a port in Hawaii.”
“No joke.”
I wished it was a joke.
Vernal, the only other police officer in our tiny town, was waiting for us. Well, I had sworn in Coral, the girl I’d hired to take my place as secretary and dispatcher, but she wasn’t in uniform. I’d been able to hire Vernal because a childhood bout with polio left him with a bad arm so he couldn’t enlist or go work in the bauxite mines. He was just a kid but he had a lot of promise as a peace officer. Lord knows he was eager enough.
“Hey, Zeke,” Vernal said.
“Hey, boy.”
Vernal took Zeke’s arm to lead him to the bathroom. “Come on now, I turned on the boiler so the water’s nice and hot,” he said to Zeke.
“Don’t forget the carbolic soap and scrub brush,” I said.
“You two is a barrel of laughs,” Zeke said.
While Vernal supervised Zeke’s shower I sorted through the piles of old clothing in our storage room. We’d collected it for years for the hobos and drifters who used to come through town on their way to Reno looking for work or a soup kitchen. Since the war started we hadn’t needed used clothing like we used to. It seemed like every man and a lot of women in the country had enlisted or found a job. Which is how I got to be Chief of Police and Vernal got to be a police officer in spite of a crippled left arm.
I handed a pile of clean clothes through the bathroom door to Vernal. Zeke was singing “The Last Round-Up” in a thin squeaky voice while he soaped himself up.
“I’ll call the café to bring something over for Zeke to eat,” I said.
“Don’t forget he ain’t got but five teeth.”
So I ordered up green pork chili with fry bread and coffee for Zeke’s dinner. Tomorrow morning, when I released him, he’d be clean, dressed in fresh clothes and have a full belly. Which was all I could think of to do for that loco old man.
I groped my way across the desert along a dirt road, again guided by a long row of white-painted rocks, to my family’s ranch house. It was just me living there now. I hadn’t been born to be a rancher. I didn’t inherit my father’s fondness for stepping in cow pies, harvesting hay in the blistering heat and stringing barbed wire. Neither did my brother, who got a job in a bank in Sacramento as soon as the economy perked up. Since I was the daughter of the family I stayed home to take care of our parents. Once my folks were gone I enrolled in secretarial school and then got hired by the police department. I leased out our grazing land to a neighbor and accepted a butchered steer for my freezer as part of the payment. My brother complained, but I told him if he wanted to come back and chase cattle around the desert all day he was welcome to it. He didn’t.
I loved living alone under the tall desert sky. Unnatural for a young woman, I’d been told, but I didn’t care a whit what people thought of me. Never had. Which came in handy when I got appointed police chief of Desperation, Nevada.
I stopped by the stable with an apple for a chat with Dickie, my dapple-grey cow pony. Then I opened the ranch house door and groped around in the dark for the light switch. I flicked it on and checked to make sure that my blackout curtains were drawn. I hated them for blocking out my view of the desert sky at night, clear and high and blinking with thousands of stars. So stupid, really; if the government thought that the Japs could bomb Nevada, they wouldn’t have built so many airfields and training camps out here. But maintaining a blackout was good for morale, they said, and as police chief of my little town I had to enforce the law. Which meant I had to obey it too. I might as well get used to it. I had a feeling that before this war was over, the government would think of a lot more rules and regulations.
It wasn’t against the law to sit out on my own front porch yet, so after I put on my pajamas, made a leftover steak sandwich and poured a tumbler of scotch, I went out there and rocked a while. After I finished my sandwich I poured myself another scotch and rocked some more, thinking about Zeke.
Should I confiscate his shotgun? I hated to do that. On the one hand the old-timer was unpredictable when he was drunk, but on the other a man, and a woman for that matter, needed a gun out here. To kill rattlesnakes if nothing else. And Zeke did own a silver mine. A poor one, but still some wannabe outlaw might take it into his mind to try to steal what little silver the man had. If he couldn’t defend himself Zeke could get hurt and no one would know for days. If he would just quit going on a bender when he came into town for supplies it sure would be a help to me.
As it turned out I didn’t have to worry about disarming Zeke. When I walked into the office the next morning Vernal met me at my desk. He touched his hat to me, like always.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he said.
“And good morning to you. How’s our prisoner?”
“Not too good. He’s dead.”
Vernal opened the cell door. Zeke’s body lay face up on his cot with one hand dangling out from under the blanket that covered him.
“I found him when I brought him a cup of coffee this morning,” Vernal said. “Lying there just like that. I reckon he died in his sleep.”
I pulled back the blanket from Zeke’s face. He looked real peaceful. I covered his face again and turned to Vernal.
“Have you called the doc?”
“Yeah. He said he’d come when he could. Should I notify the undertaker?”
I shook my head. “Not until Doc sees him. He’s got to sign the death certificate saying it was a natural death before we can move the body.”
Vernal looked disconcerted. “He’s just going to lie there? For how long? I mean he must have died in his sleep. He was locked up in a cell.”
“It’s procedure, and procedure exists for a reason.”
We closed and locked the cell door behind us before going back into the front office we shared with Coral. She’d just gotten into work, her tiny frame lost behind her desk. Some folks thought I shouldn’t have hired her since she had a Japanese grandparent, but I didn’t have any time for that mess.
“Coral,” I said, “would you call the mayor’s office and leave a message with his secretary for him to call me?” Mayor Jonah Moss was a cattle broker and would be at the stockyards outside of town at this hour. “Tell her that we had a prisoner die in his sleep in one of our jail cells overnight and I need to talk to him.”
Coral, her black hair swinging just below her ears and her glasses resting on the tip of her nose, picked up the telephone receiver. She didn’t seem surprised or upset to learn there was a dead man in the jail. Her composure was one reason I hired her.
“Who died?” she asked.
“Zeke Smith,” I answered.
“That crazy old prospector?”
“That’s the one.”
I liked to patrol the streets of Desperation first thing in the cool of the morning, when people were out and about going to work and running errands. Sheriff Porter, my predecessor who’d hired me six years ago, impressed on me the need for the law to be visible to the public. “Let the citizens know you’re working,” he said. “Keep your eyes open and ask questions.” I was visible, all right. I was the only woman police officer anyone in town had ever seen. Hell, I was the only woman police officer I had ever seen.
The townspeople muttered behind my back plenty when I was appointed Chief of Police. But they knew the town was short of manpower and expected I’d be temporary until a man could be found for the job. They didn’t know I had no intention of giving it up. I liked the job and the salary that came with it.
I saw the doc across the street and flagged him down.
“You look at Zeke yet?” I asked.
“I’m on my way there now,” Doc said, mopping his neck and bald head with a bandanna. “But I can tell you right now he died of old age and alcoholism. His liver must be rock-hard. Once I look him over I’ll tell Vernal that he can call the undertaker.”
When I got back to the office I found Coral sorting through a pile of wanted posters that had come in the mail. Most of them went into the circular file. She’d learned quickly that I didn’t give a damn about some bored teenager who took a joyride in a borrowed Jeep. He was his ma and pa’s problem, not mine.
“Vernal’s out at the high school,” she said.
Another thing Sheriff Porter taught me. “Let the kids at the high school see you every week. Boys that age, and sometimes girls, need to remember that a lot of the stuff they’d like to do is illegal.”
“And the mayor returned your call. He said he’d meet you at Martha’s for lunch.”
I scooted into Jonah’s booth at Martha’s café. He stood up until I was seated and then sat back down, tucking his napkin into his neck. “Good morning, Chief. What’s this about a man dying at the jail?”
Jonah Moss ran a cattle-buying business that employed a dozen men even during the Depression. He’d been mayor of the town for twenty years. He still dressed like a working cowboy in denim trousers and checkered shirts and fastened his belt with a silver buckle he’d won at some rodeo when he was a kid.
“Zeke Smith,” I said.
“That addled prospector that’s been around since the Flood?”
“That’s the one. I’d locked him up for a night to get him clean and fed after he waved a shotgun around the mercantile yesterday. When Vernal brought him a cup of coffee this morning he’d died in his sleep.”
Jonah gulped from his mug of black java. “We should all be so lucky,” he said.
“So what do I do now?” I asked. “I mean after the doc looks at him and we call the undertaker. I reckon his funeral will be on the town.”
“We’ll plant him in the pauper’s section. For sure he ain’t got no money.”
The waitress appeared and I ordered a tuna fish sandwich and Jonah asked for a bacon sandwich with French fries. The waitress topped off our coffee before she left.
“I guess all that’s left for you to do is notify the next of kin.”
That took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought that the old man might have relatives. Where would I start to look for them?
“You don’t think he left a will, do you?” I asked.
Jonah laughed. “One with the name of his closest relative and a current address?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“I had Lucille and her ma check the town files before I came over here,” Jonah said. Lucille was Jonah’s secretary and her ma was Mrs. Orelia Neeley, although the Mrs. was honorary. She never was actually married to Mr. Neeley. There were no preachers and no law back when they set up housekeeping.
Orelia arrived in town decades ago to work as a saloon girl. She was one of those elderly people whom you expect will live forever. Though her mind was clouding up, her memory of the old days in Nevada was legendary. When she got bored with porch-rocking and biscuit-eating she’d go over to Jonah’s office and help Lucille out.
“Did Lucille and her ma find anything?”
“Nothing at all, not one word on paper, but Orelia remembered when Zeke first came to town and staked his claim. She says he didn’t have any family.”
The waitress poured us fresh cups of coffee and carried off our plates. Jonah lit a Camel, inhaling it deeply and exhaling circles of smoke that floated up to the tin ceiling.
“I reckon the state gets Zeke’s land then?” I said.
“Not right yet. We need to search Zeke’s property for any sign of family, letters, a will, legal papers, whatever.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and Zeke had a partner, Orelia says. She doesn’t recollect his name. Had quite a horse, she said, a black gelding named King he decked out in a Mexican bridle. Anyway, Orelia said the two of them argued just a few months after they set up their claim and Zeke bought the partner out. Remembers the guy riding out of town on that horse. When you’re at the shack see what you can find out about him.”
I never knew which was worse, driving out in the desert with the truck windows rolled down so sand and dust blew all over me, or closing the windows and getting baked alive. For this trip, I chose dust. I tuned to the local radio station and turned the volume up loud to listen to country music. Once I was most of the way to Zeke’s place I heard the chirrup which meant that Coral was interrupting the commercial frequency. “Chief Jensen, call in when you can,” she said, and then the music resumed. She’d said “when you can,” which meant it wasn’t important enough to interrupt what I was doing. After I was done at Zeke’s I’d go over to my own place to clean up and use the telephone.
When I got to Zeke’s I walked down to the crick that ambled by the mine and practically took a bath. I filled my hat with water and doused my head, then sponged the worst of the sand and dust off my face and neck with my bandanna. Then I drained my canteen and refilled it.
I passed by Dusty’s resting place on the way to the shack. Poor old guy, I thought, he must have had a hard life even for a mule.
Once inside the shack I had to wait a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the dimness of the single room. I pulled on work gloves. If I were Zeke’s papers, I thought, where would I be? In an empty cigar box or coffee can, probably.
I started at Zeke’s sleeping area, lifting the blanket and pillow off the dirty mattress. I got down on my hands and knees and checked under the bed where Zeke’s boots had been. Lifting the lid on an old carpetbag I found some dingy underwear, holey socks, a couple of towels wrapped around a bar of soap and a rusty razor. An extra pair of pants, two shirts and a nightshirt hung on pegs in the wall. Circling back toward the door I found a slicker and a flannel jacket on two more pegs. I went through every pocket, turning up a pocketknife with a broken blade and a bandanna. In the kitchen corner, I sorted through Zeke’s box of supplies. It contained three cans of beans, two of peaches, coffee, sugar and white bread. That left a shelf of dishes, mugs and old coffee cans over the stove. One of the cans held forks, knives and spoons, another a few packages of Hostess CupCakes and then I hit pay dirt. A third and final can hid a thin sheaf of papers. I squatted on the floor and leafed through them. No will, no letter, nothing, except a signed and notarized deed to Zeke’s mine in the name of Zeke Smith and William Pardee. Pardee must have been Zeke’s partner, the man Orelia remembered. I fanned through the papers again. I didn’t see a new deed, the one Zeke should have gotten after he bought out Pardee. Maybe he didn’t bother. I checked the date on the original claim—1907. Which meant Zeke had been living out here with just a mule for company for more than thirty years, and the mule had been dead part of the time. No wonder he was loony.
I guess the town would need to check state records in Carson City to see if the mine was still deeded to both Zeke and Pardee. If it was, we might have to search for Pardee or his relatives. I was sure they would be thrilled to know that they’d inherited a patch of desert in Nevada. Zeke probably owed taxes on it, too.
I tucked the deed into my shirt pocket and went outside. I had to answer a call of nature, so I went behind Zeke’s old truck, which was ridiculous since there was no one within miles. On the way to my vehicle I passed Dusty again and couldn’t help stopping to look at the sorry thing. I saw a pathetic hoof poking out from the sand and paused, surprised. Dropping to my knees, I picked up the hoof and held it in my hands. Still attached to a sturdy leg bone, the hoof was large and real wide, bigger than any mule hoof I’d seen before. I carefully laid it back down in the sand, jumped to my feet and went back to the shack where I collected a ragged broom. Back outside I began to brush sand and dirt away from the creature’s skull and backbone. Once they were revealed I stared at them. The skull was small, the jawbone narrow, and the backbone wasn’t straight. The vertebrae near the shoulder were jammed together, forming the rise of the withers of a horse. A horse, not a mule. A horse. This wasn’t Dusty.
Why was there a horse skeleton outside Zeke’s mine? Why had he told everyone it was Dusty’s? What happened to Dusty if he didn’t die here?
The sky rotated above me and dark spots crowded my vision. The heat, I thought. I needed to get out of it to think. I went to sit in my truck, but it was too hot. Taking up my canteen I drank half the water in it. I still felt dizzy, but I couldn’t bear the thought of going back into Zeke’s filthy shack.
I glanced over at the mine opening and hesitated. I hated tight spaces, but the shaft looked dark and cool. It was the only shade around. I slung my canteen over my shoulder and headed for the mine. I’d rest for a few minutes and then head home to call the office.
Once out of the sun my vision cleared and I began to feel human. I knew I was dehydrated, so I drank the rest of the water in my canteen. Sweat dried on my body while I wondered about Zeke and his damned mule.
As my eyes adjusted to the interior of the dark mine I noticed something white gleaming further back in the shaft. Curious, I stood up and went to see what it was. When I saw the heap of animal bones I had to lean up against the wall and catch my breath. It had been a mule once, no question. This was Dusty. And lying in a heap nearby was a mound of decaying horse tack that had once been quality. The bridle had silver medallions, black with tarnish, mounted on it. I wondered what the hell had gone on out here.
I found a lantern filled with lamp oil at the mouth of the mine. I lit the wick and turned the flame up as far as I could. I headed further into the mine. I proceeded slowly around a corner into the pitch-black tunnel keeping my eyes on the ground so I didn’t trip over something. When I stopped and looked up again, the biggest damn vein of silver ore I’d ever seen stared me right in the face. Buried in a wide blue-green swath of copper-oxide, the silver showed dark and sooty. And floating in the vein were specks of gold.
Zeke and Pardee had been rich men. But the old skinflint couldn’t spend the money. For years he lived on beans and white bread in a filthy shack in the desert rather than let anyone know he’d struck it rich.
Holding the lantern up, I went further into the mine, and just a few feet along the shaft I found one of those depressions in the dirt that I’d read about in the FBI manual I’d found in my desk after I became chief of police. A rectangular depression in the dirt caused by burying a body. Decomposition releases gases that cause a human body to shrink, and the dirt piled on top of it is never as dense as the original soil.
I had a shovel in my truck, but not a probe. I could dig the body up myself, but I wanted help and a witness.
Back at my house I showered off the dust, sand and dirt from my body and changed into a fresh uniform in less than fifteen minutes. The revulsion I felt after my discoveries at Zeke’s claim would take longer to dissipate.
I called the office. Coral answered. “Is Vernal around?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’s right here.”
“Tell him to meet me at Zeke’s place as soon as he can,” I said. “And make sure he brings a shovel. Did you have something you needed to tell me?”
“The Mayor called. Orelia had a lot of free time this afternoon so she went through all the town files again. She found a couple of letters from William Pardee’s niece in 1909 and again in 1911, asking if anyone had seen or heard from him. Appears he’d disappeared and they were trying to find him.”
I didn’t say anything more to her. I needed to collect my thoughts before I told the world the unlikely tale of Zeke Smith, miser, who had killed his partner, a horse and his own mule rather than share untold wealth with another man.
I wondered if Pardee’s niece was still alive, or if she’d had children. If so they were about to become very rich.