Anyway, I stayed on after the construction was finished. The Dutch company’d been contracted to operate the depot once they’d built it, and they needed hands for cartage and security. And I didn’t have anything better to do and actually, strange as it sounds, I kind of liked it out there in the high desert. At least at first. It felt like time went slower there. Cities sort of rush you along, if you know what I mean. Whereas in the desert an hour goes by and nothing happens but maybe the wind blows a few grains of sand across the salares. The salt basins.
I made friends with a guy named Bastián. Bastián was a forklift driver from the south of the country, spoke English, claimed to have a grandmother who spoke Quechua, which meant fuck-all to me. Skinny little guy but strong for his size. Dark-haired. He had a sense of humor, which I appreciated. When I told him about the light on the horizon he grinned and said, Shit, Eugene, that’s the alicanto.
We were off behind the depot buildings in the shade, sharing a smoke where the crew boss wouldn’t see us. I said, Well, what’s an alicanto?
It’s a bird, he says. It’s got metal wings and it lives in caves and eats gold and silver. Its wings light up at night, all different colors.
Bullshit, I say.
Yeah, obviously, Bastián says. Or no, not bullshit exactly but a myth. A legend. The alicanto’s good luck for miners. Follow it to find silver or gold. But if it sees you, it leads you nowhere. It lets you die in the desert.
I’m no miner, I tell him. And I don’t believe in any fucking alicanto.
Fair enough, he says. I don’t believe in your light.
So I told him, next time I saw it I’d wake him up and show him.
But we got pretty busy about then. There were big shipments coming through. How it worked was, goods were trucked in from the railhead. Some of it was food but most of it was hardware. Electronics: integrated circuits, transformers, microwave generators. And some large-scale stuff. Machines for working metal. Aluminum parts. Tubes and piping. Crates listed on the manifest as powdered silicon carbide. Pressurized hydrogen. Mirrors, huge ones. Graphite. I mean, what the fuck? I’m no expert, but why does a copper mine need mirrors and graphite?
And it was a strange arrangement all around. These shipments were delivered from the Ferrocarril and the crates would sit in our store house for a couple of days, then a fleet of trucks would come down the road from the east and we’d load ’em up. It made no sense. Why not just deliver it all straight to the mine? Also, the guys who drove those trucks—copper miners, supposedly—never talked to us. They’d nod if you said hello, but they were all about their manifests. They didn’t socialize. They never even stepped out back of the shed for a smoke—none of them smoked. Guys in white shirts and jeans, neat and clean as fucking Mormons. Eyes on the clipboard at all times.
What I figured out was that we were there to sanitize their operation. You know what I mean? So nobody from outside ever got to see the mine. What ever they did there was always out of sight, over the horizon. We were as close as anybody was allowed to get—and all we ever saw were these guys in their unmarked trucks.
Which made me curious.
Bastián, not so much. It was just a job to him, he didn’t give a fuck how the mine worked. Not until one night, one of those nights without a breeze of any kind, I woke up, it might have been three or four in the morning, I couldn’t sleep, so I stepped out of the bunk house to get some air, cold as it gets at night even in summer in the Atacama, and the light was shining again, like a candle on the horizon. So I went and woke up Bastián. There, I told him. See? There’s your goddamn alicanto.
I don’t know what that is, Bastián says, serious for once. Maybe some kind of smelter they’re running. But he knew better than that.
I could tell he was curious. We talked it over now and then for a couple of weeks. But it was busy times. Lots of supplies going into the mine. And something else strange: nothing ever came back the other way. No copper, no ore, nothing raw and nothing refined. One time I asked one of those white-shirt truck drivers how that worked. Did they dig a dry hole or what? And he looked at me like I was something that crawled into his boot during the night. No, he says, we’re still getting it up and running. Meanwhile staring at my name where it was stitched on my shirt. Making notes.
The next day the shift boss took me aside and gave me a lecture about minding my own business, do my work and let the truckers do theirs, etcetera. And if I wanted to keep my job I should shut my mouth and get on with it. Which didn’t really bother me because I’d got to the point where I’d saved enough of my salary to move on. And it looked like there’d be no hard feelings if I did.
Which might have been the end of the story if Bastián hadn’t spent one of those Chilean holidays, I forget which one, Feast of the Virgin, Feast of Peter and Paul, Feast of What ever, in Antofagasta with his buddies from the port where he used to work. He came back with a couple of bottles of Pisco. No drinking allowed in the camp but he bribed a guard. So he and I sat up one Friday night and shared a bottle, out behind the ware houses where there was nobody to see us. Getting steadily drunker and complaining about the job. When up comes that light again, brighter this time. Like a wire strung between the desert and the stars. And somehow we get the stupid idea of taking one of the Toyotas in the motor pool and driving east, at least a little ways, just to see if we can see what’s going on.
You know what they say about curiosity, right? Killed the fucking cat.
Eugene Dowd interrupted his monologue to attend to the actual painting of the car, and the noise of the compressor and the stink of the paint drove Cassie outside. Thomas was fascinated by Dowd’s work on the car, and Cassie agreed to let him watch as long as he stayed behind the glass door of the upstairs office—a ventilator built into the wall of the garage sucked most of the urethane mist out of the building, but Cassie didn’t want him breathing even a little of it. Beth volunteered to stay with Thomas where she, too, could watch Dowd. She had been watching Dowd all day, Cassie had noticed, and Dowd had returned every one of her frequent glances, with interest.
Outside, the sky was cloudless and the air was tolerably warm for December. Cassie walked past Dowd’s noisy wind chimes, around a corner of the garage to a patch of packed brown earth, sheltered from the wind, where a pair of ancient lawn chairs had been set up. She was surprised to find Leo in one of them, reading.
Reading a book. Reading the book her uncle had written, The Fisherman and the Spider. She gaped at the tattered yellow jacket. “That’s mine, Leo—where’d you get that?”
He looked up, startled. “Hey, Cassie.”
“The book,” she said grimly.
“Oh. Sorry. Yeah, it’s yours. I grabbed it from the hotel room in Jordan Landing.”
Cassie had thought the book was lost. She didn’t know whether to be grateful to Leo for saving it or angry that he hadn’t bothered to give it back.
He added, a little sheepishly, “I didn’t think you’d mind…”
She sat down in the brittle webbing of the second chair. She imagined herself falling through, getting her behind stuck in the aluminum struts. That would be graceful. “No. I mean, I guess it’s okay. But I do want it back. You’re actually reading it?”