6

 

Somehow we managed to restore the gravesite to some resemblance of how we had found it, although surely no one could have doubted—even after we clumsily put back the tufts of grass that we had set aside before we had begun digging in earnest—that the grave had been disturbed. The eerie silence pervading the place, aside from the omnipresent crickets, compelled us to finish our work with more haste than care, on the assumption that no one would be much concerned whether any ghoulish actions had occurred here or not.

The silence persisted as we drove back to Randy’s house—but in this case, it was a silence caused by my own mental turmoil and by my partner’s aggressive mask of ignorance. My hands shaking as they clutched the steering wheel, I flung harried and suspicious looks at Randy at random moments, but somehow couldn’t face the thought of confronting him on what, if anything, he knew about this whole awful affair. Fragments of what Randy had grudgingly told me a few days ago—“I don’t think he died at the mine”…“he was burned”—coursed through my mind, their import even more inexplicable than they had been when he had uttered them.

At last, pulling up quietly in front of his house, I blandly locked all the doors of the car just as he was about to exit without a backward glance or a single word. He tugged at the door handle as if repeated and increasingly agitated attempts to manipulate it would magically cause it to open. I let him wrestle with his embarrassment and discomfiture until he finally gave up and lay still, staring straight ahead of him into the dark.

“You knew what we were going to find, didn’t you?” I said quietly.

“No, I didn’t!” he whined, like a little boy being scolded by his mother.

“You knew the body had been burned.”

“I didn’t know! That’s just what someone said. I couldn’t make sense of it at the time myself. How could I? It was all just talk…no one really knew anything.”

“Who told you that?”

“I can’t remember…just one of the guys. I think”—and here he did glance slyly at me—“some of them weren’t keen on telling me, because they knew we were friends and maybe it’d get back to your mom.”

I passed over the euphemism (“we were friends”) and said, “So you don’t think Mom was told either?”

“How would I know?” he moaned. “I guess not. Haven’t you talked to her about this?”

“Of course I have—but she seems to know less than you do.”

Randy fell into a moody silence, looking at his hands. He seemed to be resentful that I was somehow blaming him for this whole series of events.

I got a sense that he really didn’t know more than he was saying. Why should he? So I relented, unlocking the doors and patting him on the arm. “It’s okay, Randy. It’s not your fault. But,” I added with grim determination, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this, and I hope you might help me somehow.”

I wasn’t even sure how he would do that. But that comment was enough for him to wheel around and paste a long, wet kiss on my mouth. It was as if he was reminding me that we had entered into physical intimacy again—whatever the reasons for that might have been—and that he therefore felt at liberty to renew the intimacy whenever he wished. Maybe I wasn’t quite his “girl” again; but we’d touched each other’s privates, and now I was enlisting him as an ally into whatever course of action I wanted to take. And that made us a couple, whether I liked it or not.

I pulled away from the kiss at last and said quietly, “Go home, Randy. And don’t let Andy hear you.”

He grinned at me boyishly as if we’d just come back from a make-out session. With a final, surprisingly gentle stroke of my cheek with his hand he almost leapt out of the car and made his careful way back into his house.

I did the same, and upon entering the front door I could still hear my mother snoring her head off. The time to confront her about all this would come, but not now.

 

And I wasn’t sure it would come the next morning either.

She was up before I was—no surprise there, as I took the occasion to sleep in well past my usual time for rising. As I stumbled into the kitchen, she was placidly seated at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, her own breakfast long finished.

She looked up at me blandly, then with faint alarm. “Gee, Alison, you don’t look so good.”

Thanks, Mom. “I didn’t sleep very well.”

She furrowed her brow, perhaps wondering whether I would take offense at her saying something maternal. “Coffee might help” was what she ended up saying.

“It sure would,” I agreed heartily.

As I sat down with my own cup, earning another motherly frown because it was unaccompanied by any food, she said, “Anything troubling you?”

The comment seemed formulaic, but I couldn’t help wondering if she had indeed heard my coming or going in the wee hours of the night. And I wondered even more what she really knew about my father’s death—or, more pertinently, whether I could somehow pry that knowledge out of her.

I was too exhausted to try. She could be even more mulishly intransigent than Randy—and that’s saying something. After a long and uncomfortable silence during which I managed to drain the cup of coffee but felt disinclined to take any more, or to engage in even idle chitchat with her, I got up from the table to take a long, hot, refreshing shower.

My course of action lay elsewhere. I needed more information—and it amused me to think that the person who might best help me was Andy.

I sauntered over to her house later that morning. Randy was safely at work and wouldn’t return until dinnertime, and I doubted that housework or anything else took up so much of Andy’s time that she couldn’t spend a few hours doing my bidding.

I want to emphasize that I never disliked Andy—not in high school, and not now. How could I? She and Randy were so close that in some weird way I felt I had dated her just as I had dated her twin brother. Whatever umbrage she had taken at my monopolizing his time—and his body—back then had now dissipated, and she surely wasn’t worrying that I would snatch him away from her clutches now.

When I knocked on her door, she opened it and gave me a broad smile. She seemed naively grateful that I had sought her out specifically, and that little jolt to her self-esteem lent an unwonted radiance to her doll-like face.

“Alison!” she cooed. “How wonderful to see you! Come on in.”

I stepped in quietly, not knowing how she’d react to my plea for help. Maybe she’d be flattered; or maybe she’d sense some ulterior motive—a crafty way of getting closer to Randy through his twin. She wasn’t stupid by any means—that was exactly why I was coming to her.

She offered me coffee, but I declined. Sitting modestly on the couch, I said: “Andy, I wonder if you could help me.”

Her eyes widened, but her general expression remained cautious. She needed to know more about what I wanted.

So I explained. What I needed to have her—or, rather, us—do is to comb the files of the Dunsmuir Republican for other incidents at the mine that might be relevant: deaths, accidents, anything that might help to shed light on my father’s death. I confess that I was in some ways just as manipulative in dealing with her as I had been with Randy—I frankly played the sympathy card, saying (without in any way alluding to the appalling sight that Randy and I had seen at the grave) that I just needed to come to terms with what had happened to my father. I went on to suggest—what, in fact, I was convinced was true—that my father’s fate was not entirely singular. Something like it might have happened before.

Throughout this entire narration, which I gave with a voice that occasionally shook with entirely genuine emotion, Andy gazed at me with that wide-eyed expression, her mouth occasionally opening in a fusion of amazement, sympathetic grief, and puzzlement. Clearly she had not given much thought to the dangers of the mine, even though her own father had had to retire early because of unspecified ailments that had clearly come from his own decades of exhausting work there. And I couldn’t help craftily hinting that what we might or might not find through our research might in some dim way help Randy, now that he had already committed years to that dirty and thankless work and might face similar difficulties if we didn’t come to his assistance.

At the end of my spiel, all Andy said was, “Okay.”

I suspect she welcomed the prospect of getting out of the house. She was not natural housewife material, and I couldn’t imagine she was entirely happy puttering around the place all day—there just wasn’t enough to do, and she wasn’t quite so brainless that she could be satisfied watching soap operas and game shows all afternoon. Anyway, she could justify her working for me by convincing herself that she was really doing it all for Randy’s welfare.

So we ambled over to the public library.

I wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed. The paper had begun in 1872, about three years after the mine itself had initiated its operations, so we could theoretically get a pretty comprehensive view of the whole history of the mine—or, at least, of any “accidents” or other untoward events that had occurred there—by a systematic reading of the entire run of the paper. I decided to put Andy to the task of reading the more recent issues, starting about fifty years ago. She was no dummy, but probably she would have an easier time digesting news items of this period than those of older vintage, which might be expressed in language she was unfamiliar with.

“But what,” she said in her wide-eyed way, “are you looking for?”

“I wish I could tell you, Andy,” I said frankly. “Just let me know what you find, and I’ll see if it’s of any importance.”

And so the work began. By the end of that day, I realized that it would take a lot longer than I’d expected. Somehow I thought we could finish in a matter of days, but the paper—especially the older issues, where standards of reporting were very different—was difficult to get through quickly. We couldn’t work continuously for hours on end, for our concentration tended to flag after looking at so much newsprint, and we had to take frequent breaks to let our minds rest.

We tended to arrive around 10 A.M., and I would treat Andy to a quick lunch at a greasy-spoon diner a few blocks away before I dragged her back to the library to work until about 3 P.M. After one particularly wearying day, I accepted Andy’s invitation to stay a while and have some tea and cake bfore I trudged home.

Andy evidently took some pride in being a hostess, for all that she got very little practice at it: Randy had few friends and didn’t seem inclined to invite them over to his house for a meal, and even if he had done so his working-class guests would probably not have been notably impressed by Andy’s Emily Post imitation. Maybe she felt that I would be somewhat more appreciative—and I was.

But the tea and cake, instead of reviving me, only made me sleepy. I sat back against the not terribly comfortable couch and closed my eyes for what I thought would be only a few seconds of rest, but then drifted off to sleep.

I was woken in a strange way—by Andy kissing me lightly on the mouth.

My eyes popped open, and I looked at her in astonishment. Andy, sitting next to me on the couch, had a strange light in her eyes, not to mention a furious crimson blush that suffused her entire face.

“What…?” I stammered.

“I’m sorry, Alison!” Andy cried in what seemed like excessive self-abasement. “You just looked so cute sitting there asleep, I couldn’t resist!”

“That’s all right,” I said slowly. And then I reached out and drew her closer to me.

I guess I haven’t mentioned that I’m bisexual.

I didn’t know I was until I got to college. My two-year involvement with Randy in high school had made me both keen on and wary of entanglements with men, and so I generally kept my distance from the eager young guys at Lehigh who felt they had been liberated from their parents’ supervision and could bed down with any girls whom they could cajole into doing so. I didn’t get pestered a great deal—my rank as a ravishing vixen wasn’t all that high—but there were those who did approach me, and when I rejected them I developed the reputation of being standoffish and even unapproachable. That led to inevitable whispers that I might be a lesbian, and so some actual lesbians began to wonder if they might have a chance with me.

The long and the short of it is that I did in fact plunge into the lesbian subculture on campus. There was something comforting about (a) not having to worry about getting pregnant, and (b) not having to continually soothe the delicate male ego in and out of bed. And I have to say that the first time my bare breasts came into contact with another woman’s was an experience not to be missed. That was certainly nothing a man could provide!

And yet, I’ll be honest and say that I did hunger for the male organ. Lesbian sex is mostly a matter of mutual masturbation—which (don’t get me wrong) can be profoundly satisfying, but now and then I yearned for the irreplaceable intimacy of penetration. When the urge became too great, I picked a young man almost at random to fulfill the urge, discarding him almost before he had finished his business. That didn’t help my reputation any, but by then I was past the point of caring. Just as I knew I’d never have a permanent union with Randy, for all the unending copulation we engaged in, I knew that none of these college boys would make suitable husband material for me.

But what was I, now, to make of Andy’s overtures? As we embraced, then kissed, then began fondling each other unabashedly, I sensed that she was in more desperate straits than I was. Here she was, trapped in a weird platonic pseudo-marriage with her own twin brother: there was no possibility of physical intimacy with him, but he would probably react with just as much horror and resentment at her establishing any kind of communion with another man—especially another mine worker—as she would if he had taken up with any of the marriageable women in town. They were both caught in a kind of unwelcome but inescapable celibacy—and that’s not healthy for anyone.

And so Andy and I drifted over to the bed and did our business. I won’t say it was the best lesbian sex I’d ever had, but it was better than adequate. Andy didn’t strike me as essentially lesbian anyway: I daresay she longed for a man’s caress, but in the absence of that she figured I would do.

You may wonder why I’m going on about my sexual escapades with both Randy and Andy. Surely they are irrelevant to the story I’m telling? I wish they were: it would make this story so much simpler.

We began making our cuddling sessions a regular thing—maybe two or three times a week. At one point Andy frankly asked me if Randy and I were “getting it on,” and I had to confess that we’d fooled around a bit. It rather amused me that, for all the relentless intimacy of our high school years, he hadn’t yet seen me naked during this summer’s shenanigans, but Andy had.

But we continued our work at the library, and we did make some interesting discoveries. The overall picture that emerged, however, seemed to result in greater confusion than before. The upshot was this:

There were any number of incidents that struck us as odd, even tragic and horrific, in spite of the studied blandness with which they were described by the mostly anonymous reporters who covered them. Over the course of more than a century, four or five different patterns could be said to emerge:

1) There were indeed some apparent parallels to what had happened to my father—the deaths of random individuals at or near the mine. No report ever mentioned anything like the burning that my father’s body had been subjected to, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t have happened. A surprising number of these incidents seemed to occur either in spring or in fall (my father had died in the spring of 2016).

2) There were alarming reports, at wide intervals, of miners—or perhaps other individuals associated with the mine—running amok and committing hideous acts of violence. In more than one case, a man killed his entire family, including his baby son, with a hatchet.

3) There were plenty of suicides of miners, at all times of year but possibly more often in spring and fall.

4) There were strange reports of miners—usually veterans who had worked at the mine for twenty years or more—who disappeared, the suggestion being that they had fled to parts unknown. Possibly this was a euphemism for suicide, or perhaps even murder, but what few details the news reports provided suggested an actual departure.

5) There were relatively few deaths that actually and definitively took place at the mine, and these seemed to have been investigated thoroughly and attributed to inadequate safety procedures—which resulted in suitable fines from the Bureau of Mines—or unlucky accidents.

It was difficult to know what to make of these disparate events. The very idea that they could be somehow related, or could have been the result of a single cause or phenomenon, smacked of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. And yet, the sheer number of cases—deaths, near-deaths, disappearances, and so on—seemed to preclude the possibility that they were entirely unrelated. But what could possibly be the unifying thread that linked them together, however tenuously?

I had Andy dutifully jot down the relevant details of all the incidents she identified, and then set about following some of them up. Initial results were a spectacular failure.

I attempted to call the surviving relatives of some of the dead miners, but those who didn’t simply hang up on me once they sensed the direction of my inquiries proved to be so incredibly equivocal in their grudging elaboration of the event in question that they provided no clarity at all. I distinctly recall one harried widow who, before she slammed the phone down, almost shrieked: “You’d better watch it, missy—you don’t know what the hell you’re getting into!”

And so I turned my attention back to Randy. It was now he who would have to carry the load, or at least help me carry the load, if I wished to worm out the truth about what had happened to my father—and what was really going on at the Brashear mine.