We were panning again after lunch when the day’s grace I thought we had suddenly evaporated and Gareth appeared at the edge of the trees.
“Hey, Johnboy, I figured you might be down here. Marvelous day for a spot of panning, what? I saw the hole you guys dug back there. Is that what you’re working?” He moved down the bank to the water’s edge. “What are you getting?”
Stan looked at me questioningly. I nodded and he held up the jar. “This is just one day.”
Gareth took the jar and rolled it in his hands so that the concentrates separated and the grains of gold caught the light. “One day? Jesus!”
Gareth threw a couple of handfuls of dirt into a pan and spent the next few minutes washing it intently at the edge of the river. When he was done he stood up and rubbed the tip of his finger through what he’d collected. He looked at me and smiled.
“Looks like I made a smart investment for a change.”
I told Stan to keep panning and drew Gareth away from the river. We went into the trees, out of Stan’s hearing. Gareth looked like he was about to start congratulating himself again but I cut him off before he could start.
“Let me ask you something. When, exactly, did you find out about the gold here?”
Gareth’s happy face became deliberately dumb. “What, the stuff you guys are panning? Just then, when Stan showed it to me, of course.”
“Bullshit!”
Gareth frowned and put his hands on his hips. “We’re in bed together now, Johnny, so to speak. It’s not going to do either of us any good to be antagonistic.”
“What did you do with the pipe?”
“That dirty old thing all covered with blood? Not something you can just drop by the side of the road. I put it somewhere safe, don’t worry.”
“I want it.”
“I bet you do. But I’m going to hang on to it for a while. You know what they say, money and friendship travel different paths. And it looks like there’s going to be a whole shitload of money around here soon. We need something to make sure we stay together.”
Stan and Gareth and I spent the next few hours panning. By the end of the afternoon our jar was full. Gareth said he had some mercury at his place and though we were tired from our work all of us wanted to find out how much gold we’d panned. We went up to the cabin and dumped our gear on the stoop. Marla was inside and must have heard us, but she didn’t come out. As we drove away, Gareth in his Jeep, Stan and I in my pickup, I saw her behind the front window, her face haunted and pale, watching Gareth leave.
The lake at that time of day was softly lit by the tiring sun, and the shadows of trees back from the beach had begun their first dark tappings at the edge of the water. The scent of pine was strong as we walked along the path from the parking lot, as though the air, in cooling, was squeezing from itself essences that earlier in the day had been diluted by warmth and sunshine and blue sky.
I could hear David singing before Gareth opened the door of the bungalow, an unhappy drunken yodel against a background of the Eagles blasting from a stereo. Gareth looked at me ruefully.
“The council told us on Friday that the road isn’t happening. Any further action on it has been ‘postponed indefinitely.’ Dad’s pretty fucked up about it.”
We went into the living room and found Gareth’s father sitting in his wheelchair, head thrown back, howling the words to “Hotel California.” He was unshaven and there was an open bottle on the floor beside him. His back was turned to us and Gareth had to grab the handles of his wheelchair and shake it before he realized we were there. The singing stopped abruptly and David reached out toward his son, his hands trembled and there was spilled liquor on the front of his shirt. Gareth bent and hugged him and turned off the stereo. David reached for the bottle but Gareth beat him to it and held it out of reach.
“Party’s over.”
“You’re right about that!”
Stan stepped nervously closer to me. The movement caught David’s eye.
“I’ll tell you something, young fella, life’ll fuck you in the ass as soon as look at you. You remember that. In fact it likes to fuck you in the ass.”
Gareth put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Dad, I told you it’s going to be okay. We’ve got this other thing now, this land at Empty Mile, and you, me, Johnny, and Stan here, we’re all going to be rich. You want to watch us mercury what we got today?”
David closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “No.”
“Okay. I won’t be long. Just try and relax, okay?”
Gareth headed out of the room for the barn. Stan followed him, glad to get away from the frightening drunk man. I was the last out. As I passed David he caught hold of my arm.
“It’s good you and Gareth are friends. He’s always been a good son, a good boy… But people don’t seem to take to him too well. It’s good that you like each other. Especially after your father and all.”
“My father?”
“When he cut him out of that land of yours. Boy, that deal was all Gareth could talk about for weeks. The land and how if they could somehow get it they were going to be rich, rich, rich. And then, boom, your father decides to up and go it alone. I’ve never seen Gareth so upset. Maybe things are turning out okay now, I don’t know, but he almost went crazy back then.”
I wanted to question David more about the relationship between my father and his son, but Gareth stuck his head through the doorway and asked if I was coming or what and I was forced to bite down on the explosion of understanding David’s words had ignited within me and instead put on the face of a man whose only thoughts were of gold and the money it could bring.
Placer gold, gold you can just dig out of a river, comes in particles of various size-sometimes flakes, sometimes grains, sometimes so fine the gold is known as flour gold. The smaller the particles of gold, the more difficult it is, using a pan alone, to fully separate them from the dirt in which they are found. The gold we’d dug out of Empty Mile was what would generally be called fine gold-grains a little smaller than grains of beach sand.
Panning works on the principle of specific gravity-the weight of something compared with the weight of water. Gold has a very high specific gravity and so in a pan of water it sinks to the bottom, allowing lighter material like soil and silica to be washed away. Black sand, though, which is made up of metallic minerals, also has a high specific gravity and tends to collect with the gold, making it difficult to separate the two with water alone. One of the easiest ways to get down to pure gold from concentrates is mercury amalgamation. The chemicals needed can be bought from most prospector stores and the process is simple enough that it was used by miners during the Gold Rush.
When I entered the barn behind the bungalow Gareth had already dumped the contents of our jar into a steel pan and was drying them out over a portable electric hot plate. Stan was standing beside him watching intently, absently stroking the moth bag around his neck. He looked up as I walked in.
“Showtime, Johnny.”
When the concentrates were dry Gareth spread them out on a large sheet of paper. From a drawer in the bench he took a cylinder-shaped magnet, covered it in Saran Wrap, and began dragging one end of it back and forth through the dark powder. Grains of black sand collected against it. Twice Gareth removed the plastic film and replaced it with a new piece.
Using a magnet to remove the magnetic elements of the black sand is a quick and easy first step, but black sand also contains nonmagnetic elements which a magnet can’t pick up.
Gareth tipped the remaining concentrates into a wide glass beaker. He put on clear plastic safety goggles and a pair of heavy rubber gloves, then he reached under the bench and brought up a half gallon ceramic flagon. He motioned Stan to move back.
“You don’t want to get any of this on you.”