“I meant Michael,” Mitch said.
To my confusion, I was strangely offended by this little outburst. “Michael thought he was taking care of Petty,” I said. “I think your . . . relationship with Marianne drove him completely over the edge.”
The look Mitch shot in my direction chilled me. But he brightened again when his eyes focused on Petty. “We’ll make sure this Randy King doesn’t bother you.” Mitch stood and drained his coffee cup. “Are you ready to see the mine?”
We followed Mitch out to his Taurus, where he clipped dark protective lenses over his glasses. Petty surprised me by getting in the front seat. She was obviously determined to try harder today. But there was no legroom in back, and I had to wedge my knees in behind the passenger seat.
Mitch drove the dirt road west. “Every once in a while I get to give tours of the mine, so I’m going to give you my whole spiel. Is that all right?”
“Sure,” I said. Honestly, I was more interested in how he ended up in this solitary job, living alone, collecting Precious Moments. But I didn’t want to be rude. I figured we’d get to all that eventually.
He cleared his throat. “The Black Star mine opened in 1869. Over a million tons of pyrite were taken out of the mountain before it closed in 1963.”
“What’s pyrite used for?” Petty said.
Mitch’s head jerked toward her, apparently pleased that she’d formed an entire sentence. “Lots of things.”
“Gunpowder, for one,” I said. “Paper production. Crystal radios before vacuum tubes. Now it’s used in lithium batteries and solar panels and jewelry.”
Mitch’s tired face clouded in the mirror, and I berated myself for stealing his tour--guide thunder.
“Why’d they close the mine down, then?” Petty asked Mitch.
He didn’t answer for a minute, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to answer this question. I remained silent.
“Because of nineteenth--century mining practices,” Mitch said, “the whole mountainside is contaminated. Now it’s a ghost mine.”
He drove us up switchbacks lined with towering pine and aspen trees. I saw no other houses or cabins, and few cars, just massive boulders breaking up the forest. The sky was a deep blue and the sun bright. At the top of the pass there was an expanse of level unwooded land, where Mitch pulled off and stopped the car. “You ready?’
“Sure,” Petty said. We got out. There were some old, rusty buildings and piles of crushed rock, as if they’d just stopped mining that morning.
“Over there is where the original opening was,” Mitch said, pointing. “In those days miners used a technique called longwall mining. It was all picks and shovels, digging into the earth and making rooms. They put timbers in there to prevent cave--ins. Miners at the turn of the century worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. They were paid three--fifty a day, and children who sorted the ore were paid fifty cents a day.”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be a kid back then, not going to school, working in a dark hole day after day for just fifty cents. Petty appeared to be contemplating this too.
“The mine was automated in 1952,” he went on. “More than five hundred men lost their jobs. Paiute’s population decreased by almost half.”
We walked along, looking up at the barren mountain. No vegetation anywhere. Just dirt and rocks, and some ancient timbers. The openings had all been filled in—-likely to keep adventurous kids from tumbling down the shafts.
I’d never seen a mine from the 1800s before, and it was an awesome sight. I wished I could spend more time there, but I needed to get on the road tomorrow morning at the latest. With this thought, I had to push away my nagging conscience. Petty would be fine without me.
We walked around the buildings. Planted in front of an old shaft covered in barbed wire was a sign depicting a stick figure falling down a hole accompanied by rocks. It said: DANGER! ABANDONED MINE! STAY OUT! STAY ALIVE! I wished I had a camera with me, or even a cell phone.
Mitch continued his canned speech. “In 1972,” he said, “the mountain fractured, which means it collapsed on itself, and many of the shafts disappeared. It’s unknown how many miners were trapped in the shafts. The mine finally closed down completely after that.”
We walked around a little longer before Mitch said, “Back to the car.”
I followed behind him and Petty and got in the backseat. Mitch drove about a mile down the mountain and then turned off at another dirt road, which led to a huge body of water in a valley. A finger of land, a berm, maybe ten feet wide and several hundred feet long, jutted out into the middle of the lake. Mitch parked. We got out of the car again and stood looking down at it.
The water at the lake’s center was blue, but near the edges it was rust--colored in some places, tannish in others. Twenty feet from the shore stood an ancient wooden sign with the faded word FORBIDDEN handwritten on it.