July 30
Sonny McGuiness checked the time on his cell phone. Goddammit — he’d spent thirty minutes now, sitting at a corner table, staring angrily at the long-haired Indian sitting across from him. The bar was dark with shadow despite noonday sun that blazed against shuttered windows. They had the corner of the place to themselves, not because there were only ten people there, but rather because both of them smelled as if they hadn’t bathed in weeks. Sonny’s shocking-white, unkempt beard framed a scowl that furrowed his deeply wrinkled, dark-black face. The skin around his eyes was somewhat lighter than the rest of his onyx complexion, giving him an odd reverse-mask appearance. He drank his beer as if it would douse his sudden burst of temper.
“Bullshit,” he said. “You ain’t found no Silver Spring.”
“Hey, man, don’t get hostile,” said Dennis the Deadhead. He drawled out the word man, making it sound long, smooth and mellow. “You said you were a prospector, so I just thought I’d share a tale with you. You believe what you like, man.”
Dennis sipped his double shot of Red Star vodka.
The mention of the Silver Spring had caused the first conversational pause in over an hour. Sonny had entered the bar planning to drink alone, as he usually did, when he spotted a man with a telltale head of long, straight black hair. Sonny had introduced himself, then bet a beer he could guess the Indian’s tribe on the first try. The Indian’s name was Dennis Diving-Bird. Most people, however, just called him “Dennis the Deadhead.” Dennis took the bet, Sonny guessed Hopi — Dennis bought the first round.
After forty years of prospecting in the American Southwest, Sonny prided himself on guessing any Native American’s tribe. He liked Indians. They were, in fact, the only people he liked.
“The Silver Spring is just a myth,” Sonny said. “I should know, I looked for it twenty years ago and didn’t find squat.”
Dennis the Deadhead shrugged. “Where’d you look?”
“I looked in the Snake, Black, and San Francisco ranges.” Sonny finished his beer. “I didn’t find nuthin’.”
“Well, you were close,” Dennis said. He took a puff from the latest in his nonstop chain of Pall Malls. “It’s in the Wah Wahs.”
Dennis’s wrinkled face hid under long, dirty-black hair. He wore a tie-dyed shirt, a fringed leather jacket covered with Grateful Dead skull patches, and he stank. Not that Sonny minded the stench all that much; after two straight weeks in the scorching Arizona foothills, he knew he didn’t exactly smell like flowers himself.
“The legends are true, man,” Dennis said. “That spring is bubbling out of the ground into a little pool full of silver dust.”
Which in itself was bullshit, or Dennis bad been given misinformation. Silver was usually tied up in rock ores. Native silver was a rare thing, silver dust even rarer, and when it was found it was often tarnished — it didn’t actually look “silver” at all.
The story was a lie.
So why did Sonny’s gut tell him Dennis wasn’t lying?
“So it’s just sitting there,” Sonny said. “Just waiting for someone to claim it?”
“That’s right, man.” Dennis took another small, slow sip. “It’s just layin’ there, pretty as you please. As long as no one’s found it since I was there about ten years ago.”
“Right. And that’s why you’re here, at the Two-Spoke Bar, drinking rotgut vodka instead of livin’ high on the hog at the Hilton.”
“Hey, man, just ’cause I didn’t take it don’t mean it ain’t there.”
Sonny slapped the table. “Then why the hell didjya leave it?”
That came out louder than he’d intended, loud enough to draw the attention of the other patrons. Sonny leaned over his beer, ignoring them until they turned back to their own drinks.
He wasn’t mad at Dennis, only at himself. The Indian’s story was pure bullshit, yet already he felt an uncontrollable part of him embrace the tale the way a girl’s legs wrap around her lover. Some men suffer addictions to drugs, booze, women, money — Sonny’s habit was curiosity. It was that little voice pulling his strings, the one that endlessly repeated: Don’t you wanna know?
Dennis the Deadhead glanced around, as if to make sure no one was watching him. He leaned closer, spoke softly.
“I left it because that place is cursed, man.”
“Aw, go fuck yourself,” Sonny said, this time controlling his volume. “No curse ever stopped anyone from grabbin’ the pot at the end of the rainbow. I’d lift the devil’s sack and pluck treasure from his prostate, if that’s what it took.”
“That’s ’cause you ain’t ever been there,” Dennis whispered. “The Hopi know enough to steer clear of that place. No one goes out there. No reason to go there in the first place. Nothing there but dirt and rock. I went there to see for myself, to test the legends, you might say, but I only went once. The devil lives on that mountain. You can sense him, man.”
Throughout the beginning of their conversation, Dennis’s eyes had sparkled with friendly laughter. Especially when he talked of the summers of ’79 through ’84, during which he’d toured with the Dead. Now, however, Sonny noted that Dennis’s friendly emotion filtered away like the wisps of smoke from his Pall Mall. As he spoke of the Silver Spring and the Wah Wah Mountains, his eyes filled with fear. Every few seconds, Dennis looked from one corner of the bar to the next, as if the simple mention of the legend might summon some evil power.
“So if you know where this place is, how come you haven’t told anybody?”
“No one ever asked,” Dennis said. “Most people take one look at me and shy away. Can’t remember the last time someone introduced themselves and offered to buy me a drink. In fact, I think you’re the first.”
Sonny nodded. “Yeah, but a secret like that can burn a hole in a man’s belly. If no one has found it yet, you haven’t really told anyone. Why me?”
Dennis stared at Sonny. He stared long, he stared hard.
“I don’t know,” the Indian finally said. His words slurred slightly. An hour’s worth of steady drinking was beginning to take effect. “You’re a man of the land. I can feel that. Maybe I told you because if you go there, I know you’ll feel what I feel. Maybe because that place scares the shit out of me, and it won’t scare you as much, so maybe you can do something with it. Maybe it’s because I’m getting drunk. Who knows, man?”
“Could you draw me a map?” Sonny asked.
Dennis knocked back the rest of his vodka. “Buy me another Red Star and I’ll draw it right on this napkin, man. But I warn ya — you won’t like that place.”
Sonny signaled the bartender again. When a vodka and a beer landed on the table, Dennis produced a red Crayola from a jacket pocket. He started drawing on a bar napkin.
The two men talked for another hour, during which they both got exceedingly drunk. Good conversation, sure, but Sonny wasn’t really paying attention anymore. All he could think about was the possibility that the fabled Silver Spring — where silver poured from the ground like water from a bottomless well — was real.
Sonny wasn’t some greenhorn straight off the bus. He knew the Southwest like a man knows his wife’s body. He could hop in his Humvee, drive five or six hours to Utah, then hike into the Wah Wah Mountains and locate Dennis the Deadhead’s mythical spooky G-spot. The trip might take a day. Maybe two, considering hiking speed in the unforgiving Wah Wahs. That wasn’t much wasted time, and it would let him take his goddamned unrelenting curiosity and kick it dead square in its metaphorical nuts. He was already beyond his ability to control himself; the only way to get the brain-worm out of his head was to go out there and make sure Dennis was full of shit.
Sonny had to check it out, because as his sainted mother once told him: An ounce of truth lined every old wives’ tale.
Sometimes, an ounce of truth paid off with an ounce of gold.
Or, in this case, maybe an ounce of silver — Sonny wasn’t going to be picky.