Snitch World (5 page)

Brush and rubble effortlessly cleared, Klinger follows Chang Yin into a tunnel.

The first thing Klinger notices is the change in weather. Outside, all is windblown snow. Conditions are so lousy there isn’t even any traffic on Highway 24. Before they manage to instantaneously clear the debris, the road is completely drifted over. A complete whiteout.

A hundred yards inside the gallery, however, there’s a mere draft and it’s dank but, while chilly, it’s not freezing. To their knowledge nobody has been this way in many years but the smell of freshly dug earth permeates the air, rank and foetid and not unlike … rotten carpet …

Klinger frowns but does not awaken. His eyelids, though twitching, remain closed. The continuum of oneiric greed unreels, uninterrupted.

The tunnel slopes sharply down. It narrows, too, and they often stop to clear debris sufficient to allow a man to pass. Here and there a rotted timber has splintered, pushed by the insistent geology behind or above it. Only occasionally, and that by aiming his headlamp upward, does Klinger discern a lintel or any kind of overhead shoring timber, and all of these timbers, posts or lintels, appear to be creosoted rail ties, whole or fractioned, and he wonders about the condition of the local railroad.

The height of a tunnel never exceeds seven feet, more or less the vertical height of a railroad tie with one to two feet of its length buried. Never is a tunnel more than three feet wide. Often these dimensions are much less, and the two men have to crawl on their sides in single file to make progress. Because of these narrow confines, their picks and shovels are short-handled.

At the first fork in the tunnel, Chang Yin takes a confident left. At the next fork, ten minutes later, he takes another left.

Klinger tries to remember these turns. He tells himself that, on his the way back, after a cave-in has killed Chang Yin, a left will be a right. And this determination soothes his confidence until, turning to heave a shovelful of gravel, his headlamp reveals, much to his surprise, a tunnel that forks to the right behind him. He’d crouched past this gallery, as they are called, without noticing it. Surely, encountered on the way back, this gallery would count as a right turn, and … And what? Would it eventually join a tunnel that made its way to the surface? Or not?

“Klinger, mon,” Chang Yin says, behind him now, “watch out for the hole.”

Klinger turns. Chang Yin is facing him, his headlamp aimed downward and into a hole that disappears into darkness between them.

Chang Yin shows Klinger a stone and holds a finger to his lips.

Chang Yin drops the stone into the hole.

A silence wells between them like a dead spot on an FM dial.

They never hear from the stone again.

“Surely,” Klinger says, “the fucker found bottom somewhere?”

“Hard to say, mon,” Chang Yin says simply. He offers Klinger a hand. “I ain’t been down there.” He smiles. “No long rope.”

“You would,” Klinger says, as he floats a hand as if weightlessly over the hole, “explore it if you had a long rope?”

“One thing’s for sure around here.” Chang Yin turns his back and clambers over a pile of tailings. “The more fucked up a place appears to be, the fewer the people who have checked it out. Put another way, one man’s agonizing death is another man’s golden opportunity.”

“Golden,” Klinger concludes. And the thought refreshes his attitude.

“Golden,” Chang Yin affirms.

Not a few twists and turns later, Chang Yin stops for a breather. He offers Klinger his canteen.

Klinger frowns in his sleep.

“That tastes like water,” Klinger says in the dream.

“It is water,” Chang Yin tells him.

Klinger expresses astonishment. “A man goes through all this shit, and all you can offer him is water?”

“If a man goes through all this shit and finds a little gold, he can buy all the whiskey he wants,” says Chang Yin.
“Later. Right now,” he points along the beam of his head-lamp, “a man wants his faculties about him. Anything can happen.”

Klinger doesn’t ask Chang Yin what that means.

They come to another fork.

“Hmmm,” Chang Yin says. “Let’s reconnoiter.”

“What, you got a GPS?” Klinger quips.

“GPS doesn’t work down here,” Chang Yin replies.

“You’ve tried?”

“Sure. But even if it did work, it couldn’t tell you which way to go. Hell, these tunnels?” When Chang Yin shakes his head, the beam of his headlamp oscillates along the glistening walls. “They go everywhere. My ancestors were so crazy for gold, they’d dig parallel tunnels just a few yards apart, with just enough dirt and rocks between them to keep them from caving in. Sometimes they’d tunnel right through the side of another man’s tunnel, and the whole thing would cave in. If everybody survived they’d apologize to one another, fold their hands together and bow and shit, then they’d tunnel off in opposite directions. They were crazy for gold. Funny, too.”

“Anybody ever get rich?” While this seems an obvious question to have asked before they ever boarded the bus in Salt Lake City—well, here they were, weren’t they.

“Once in a while, I’m told, a man would come up out of one of these tunnels and go home, get cleaned up, get on the bus to Denver, and disappear forever. These guys weren’t exactly communicative. Sure they had partners. It’s a lot of work to dig these things. And can you imagine? They’d dig five or six days a week for a legitimate mine, then come out here and go right back at it in their spare time. Nights, Sundays, whenever. Talk about ambition.”

“Yeah,” Klinger repeats without enthusiasm. “Ambition.”

“If a guy made a real strike, nobody would ever hear
about it. Most of them were like my daddy and Steamboat. They’d tunnel when nobody else was around, or in places that were already played out, or places where everybody else was sure there were no trace minerals, or places deemed too dangerous. Daddy and Steamboat always said the best place to look was where everybody else had already given up. What looks worthless to a mining company with thousands or hundreds of thousands in overhead might look real good to one or two guys with cheap rent and a couple of kids to feed.”

After a quarter of a mile that Klinger was certain had taken them in a complete circle—”Following trace,” Chang Yin called it—Chang Yin pauses. “Hmmm.” He looks around. From the bib pocket of his overalls he pulls his father’s hand-drawn map and lays it on an angle of repose of dirt and stones that fitfully trickles around both sides of a shoring post. He studies it. He turns it ninety degrees to its previous position. He brushes aside dirt and studies some more. He turns the map thirty-five degrees, traces a fingertip over it, stops. “Hmmm.”

Klinger’s headlamp dims to half its previous intensity. “Uh-oh.” It brightens again.

From the back pocket of his bib overalls Chang Yin produces a gas-station map of Colorado, unfolds it, lays it atop the first one. “North.” He touches an X scratched into the shoring timber. “Dead north.”

Klinger stares in amazement. “How do you know that?”

Chang Yin grins. “They prairie-dogged.”

“They—what?”

Chang Yin raises a finger. “You dig straight up till you breach the surface. Have a look around, maybe even bring out the compass. Then you drag a bunch of brush over the hole, come back down, leave a mark or a sign.” He folds up the maps. “And dig on. Let’s go.”

Klinger follows Chang Yin while the latter counts footsteps, heel to toe. The ceiling gets a little higher here, and it feels as if the floor has leveled off, though it is hard to tell. Now the tunnel widens and the shoring timbers become more frequent. Chang Yin sets his maps down on the floor and studies them. Then he looks up at the ceiling. “We’re close,” he says. “Help me.” And he begins to hack at the tunnel ceiling with his pick. Klinger joins him. Dirt falls into their faces. Rocks, too. “What the fuck are we doing?” Klinger says aloud. “Animatedly committing suicide?”

“Keep digging,” Chang Yin tells him.

Soon enough, Klinger’s pick strikes something different.

“That’s it,” Chang Yin says. “Hit it!”

Klinger hits it. Splinters come away with the clods from the ceiling. Wood.

“Isn’t this a little bit dangerous?” Klinger yells above the clatter of material.

Chang Yin hacks at the roof too. “Keep digging!” And then, just as Klinger feared, the roof of the tunnel gives way.

Klinger looks down to avoid the cascade of dirt and stones. Expecting suffocation, he holds his breath. Into the circle of light at his feet tumbles a human skull.

“Holy shit!” Klinger straightens up with such alacrity that his helmet crashes through the rotted roof, foul bones and scraps of cloth shower and drape upon him, and strange cool particles trickle between his collar and his tingling nape.

Chang Yin is laughing, and laughing hard. A minute passes before he can coherently blurt, “We’re under the cemetery!” and he dissolves into laughter again. “Oh, man,” he manages to add, “you should have seen your face.”

“One man’s roof is the floor of another man’s coffin,” Klinger realizes, in a succinct deployment of dream logic. “A fucking coffin!”

Bits of flesh still cling to the skull. Horrified at least as much as he’s disgusted, Klinger punts it into the darkness with a shout. “Nuggets of gold, my ass!”

“See!” Chang Yin extends his arm. His headlamp illuminates the tunnel beyond, which runs straight, level and true. Fifty yards along, as Chang Yin explains, a gallery transects their tunnel, connecting to a parallel tunnel, which, in its turn, runs below the next parallel row of graves in the town cemetery.

“Gold nuggets, my ass,” Klinger whispers aloud.

“A gold watch will do!” Chang Yin crows. He’s on his hands and knees, the better to rake through the bones, cloth, and pine splinters with his bare hands. “A pearl necklace! A hand mirror from the nineteenth century! A gold piece tucked into a waistcoat pocket with which to pay the ferryman!”

“Gold nuggets my ass,” Klinger whispers. His voice, hoarse with hopelessness, pushes a plume of condensation before it, into the frigid air of the hotel room.

“Gold nuggets my ass, gold nuggets my ass …”

Klinger faced the day as if it were a firing squad.

How would that be, exactly?

First, recounting the $5.89 in his jeans, he realized that he had the price of a cup of coffee and a doughnut, maybe, but, unlike almost everybody else around him in the street, he certainly couldn’t afford a cappuccino and a chocolate croissant. As go firing squads, this eroded his dignity.

When he’d first come to San Francisco, in the latter third of the 20th century, Klinger felt entirely at home. He turned up in early fall wearing a hickory shirt and jeans over long johns, and wool socks within a knackered pair of cork boots. He’d left his ten-gallon straw hat behind the seat of a hay truck whose driver woke him up in time to drop him off at the 505 feeder to I-80 West, just south of Wycoff, California. The guy had picked him up in Weed, allowing for the first continuous four hours of sleep since he crossed the border at Grand Forks, British Columbia—about 800 miles and a week before.

But the point was, at that moment, dressed as he was, broke and alone, he’d never felt like he belonged someplace like he felt he belonged in San Francisco. People smiled at him on the street. In Washington Square Park two hours later, Klinger was sitting on a southwest-facing bench in the northeast corner of the park, his eyes closed against the afternoon sun. A guy sat down next him. Klinger didn’t open his eyes. The guy asked where he was coming from. A
logging camp about two hundred miles north of Spokane, Klinger told him, still not opening his eyes, north of the Idaho panhandle. What brings you to San Francisco. I heard it was a nice place. The damn truth, the man said. People seem to want to talk to you here, Klinger ventured. I first came here in a boxcar, the man said, in 1929. Klinger opened his eyes. The sunlight was brilliant, and he blinked and squinted. Didn’t have a red cent, the man continued, and that didn’t make a bit of difference to the first two or three hundred people I met. Klinger turned for a look. The guy had on a blue blazer with gold buttons, a red silk pocket square, white duck trousers, blue socks and a pair of tasseled black loafers. Met a guy called Harry Bridges. Ever hear of him? Can’t say as I have. One of the founders of the ILWU. ILWU … ? International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the man patiently explained. Then he chuckled. Damndest Australian you could ever hope to meet. Anyway, he found me a job on the docks. Later, we got our heads busted, did a little jail time together, and pissed off Joe McCarthy. A few years after the war, with a wife and a third kid on the way, I got into advertising. The man smiled at a pigeon nodding its way through a circle on the sidewalk in front of the bench. The money was better, but it was nowhere near as much fun. Now I’m retired. He sighed. Been retired. My wife parks me here every morning for an hour to take the sun while she attends her Tai Chi class. San Francisco’s been good to me. He held out his hand. Name’s Jimmy. Klinger returned the handshake. Hungry? Klinger nodded. Let’s go. The man stood slowly. There’s a good breakfast on the other side of Columbus—although, he winked, this being North Beach, you can get an argument about every word in that sentence.

Jimmy bought him breakfast. Not even to hear his story, did Jimmy buy him breakfast, though he got some
of that. No, Jimmy told Klinger, as they shook hands and parted, never to meet again, it was a pleasure to watch a hungry man eat.

And where the fuck is Jimmy this morning, Klinger muttered, trembling on the chilly street. Deceased way less than half the time between then and now, no doubt, he scowled. Even Jimmy’s kids are probably dead by now, and maybe I’m the only man in this town that remembers him. What kind of a fucking human being am I? Did I ever help a guy out like he helped me? How can I help other people if I can’t even help myself? Now there’s a reason for self-improvement. Or an excuse for devolution. That logging camp might have been the last honest work I ever did. He squinted. I can’t remember.

Back to the firing squad. Two days and six bucks to go. Carry-out destiny. Always round up, if you’re feeling pessimistic, and round down if you’re feeling otherwise, a meager dichotomy that leaves me pincered between five and six bucks. Klinger exhales sufficiently to flap his lips. I must have helped somebody, Klinger self-remonstrated as he shuffled up the sidewalk, with a buck, a meal, a pack of smokes, a bag of chips, a garbage bag to use as a rain suit—something, sometime, one thing, once at least. Yes? No?