“Do you know him, Jeffs?” asks Mendez.
“Kind of. Benny introduced us at the Bear Cave biker joint one evening. A dive, and I only went because Benny asked me. This was a couple of weeks ago. Jeffs was tending bar. As you know, he’s big, loud, and crude. Benny liked larger-than-life characters. Enjoyed their antics, their stories I guess. Benny told me they hit it off over birds. Benny was an insane birder, if you didn’t know. A great photographer, too. Of birds, all over the world.”
“Hard to think of Jeffs as a birder,” says Mendez. “Doesn’t fit with a motorcycle outlaw.”
“Not at all,” says Teller. “They were talking about some rare owl that Jeffs saw out at Caspers when he was with his wife. Said it’s enormous, and way out of range. Hunts by night, which is when Jeffs allegedly saw it. Benny wanted to photograph it. You know all about his bird travels and photography, I’m sure.”
A beat.
“It might have been all bullshit from Jeffs,” says Teller. “That seemed to be what he’s made of. He tried to tell me the secret to catching ocean fish is Jack in the Box hot sauce, directly applied to the fly or lure. Can’t be Taco Bell or McDonald’s. Says he guided in Louisiana, but I doubt that. Can’t picture a guy that big in a flats boat.”
Gale remembers this hot sauce theory from his days just back from Sangin, when he would relive his fishing memories on YouTube from his bed at the Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, wondering if he would fish again, wondering if he wanted to remain alive.
“It looks like you’ve fished all over the world,” says Mendez.
Teller surveys his radiant mounts, points to a large fish jumping through acrylic spray. The fish is iridescent yellow with green and blue splatters as if thrown on with a paintbrush. “That’s a dorado down in Baja,” he says. “East Cape. Costa Rica, Brazil, Christmas Island, Fiji, Mauritius, Australia, South Africa, all over.”
“How come you don’t have any pictures of yourself with a fish?” asks Mendez.
“The fish are prettier than me.”
“A modest man.”
“I’m rarely accused of that.”
Gale remembers a dorado he caught in Baja. The thing is, they shimmered brilliantly when alive, their colors flashing and traveling up and down their bodies, but if you killed one for the grill that night it went dull and one-dimensional in seconds.
Light is life, he thinks.
He wrestles his mind back from the Naval Hospital, certainly among the darkest hours of his life.
Light is life.
“Mr. Teller,” he says, “I was out at the Wildcoast site just a few days ago, and there’s quite a bit of excavating and drilling going on. If Wildcoast is under a strategic pause, as you say, why?”
“We’ve already paid our subs for the first phase,” says Teller. “The new people are just finishing it out. And if we decide to go ahead with Wildcoast, we’ll need the perc tests after all.”
“Are you looking for something besides groundwater?” asks Gale.
“Such as?”
“Gold?” asks Mendez.
A humored smile. “Not much in those mountains.”
“Crystals?” asks Gale.
“Quartz, for sure, which is essentially worthless. Tourmaline, maybe. There’s probably rhyolite in there. No, we’ll be happy when we hit fifty feet and either hit the aquifer or not. See what we’re up against.”
A pause.
Gale again remembers Geronima Mills’s words about the Acjacheme creation myth — “...an ocean with rooms of gigantic crystals beneath the earth... a resting place for spirits on their way to the afterlife.”
Wonders what if Hal Teller has heard of it.
Wonders if Hal Teller wants to find a resting place on his way to the afterlife.
“Why did you replace PacWest with Empire Excavators?” asks Mendez.
“Proprietary,” says Teller. “But things in this world always come to dollars and cents.”
“Does the future of the Tarlow Company change, with the death of Bennet?” asks Gale. “Big picture?”
“Certainly.”
“For better or worse?” asks Mendez, leaning forward to set her coffee mug on Teller’s crystal-clear desktop.
“No one knows,” he says. “Different. TC is one of the great Western developers, and for the last twenty years it’s been Benny’s company. His vision. Who can see the future? I can’t.”
“What makes you a good businessman?” asks Mendez.
A shrug and a somber assessment of her.
“I’ll tell you a story,” says Teller. “After a few years of working for the Tarlows, I realized that their company was not created to make homes. It was created to make money. When I graduated from high school, my father told me that’s what all businesses were for. I thought it was cynical and crass until old Tarlow told me the same thing. The founder, that is — Bennet Evans Tarlow. He used the exact same words. Bennet III and I had been arguing that idea for decades.”
A beat then, as Teller gazes down at his clear glass desktop. “I miss Benny.”
34
Late that night, after the floodlights have been turned off and the equipment operators have padlocked the gates and left, Gale, Mendez, and Geronima Mills climb the chain-link fence surrounding the alleged perc test pit on the building site of the proposed city of Wildcoast.
The cranes loom against the sky in the moonlight, and the drilling rigs and earthmovers and backhoes cast faint shadows.
They come to the mouth of the pit.
“Look at this monster,” says Mills.
Gale sees that the pit has grown to three, maybe four times the circumference it was just a few days ago.
The grading around it is now level and cleared of boulders.
And a steel-stepped stairway disappears into the cavernous dark, its railings lined with day-glow green safety tape that reflects the beam from Gale’s flashlight.
From the top of the steps, he trains his light down, sees no water as before, just the steel stairway, anchored to darkness.
Mendez runs her flashlight beam along the far wall but it’s far enough away that Gale can’t make out much more than blurred, dark sandstone.
“I’ll stay here in case Tarlow security shows up,” says Geronima. “If they do, I’ll holler.”
The stairway is too steep to take into the dark, so Gale slides his flashlight into his belt, takes the railings in his hands and backs down.
Mendez follows.
Metal scrapes on stone as the stairway wobbles with their descent.
Gale sets his feet patiently.
“You have to catch me if I fall,” Mendez calls down to him.
“Gotcha, Daniela.”
Every four steps down, Gale feels the temperature drop. He counts the steps as he used to count steps on patrol in Sangin.
“Hold up, Mendez!”
“I’m holding up.”
“I mean stop.”
“I’m stopped, I’m stopped.”
Gale works his flashlight free and feels his vertigo as he turns, holding on to the railing with one hand.
The floor looks to be another fifty feet down. The walls shine in his beam, but he neither sees nor hears dripping water. There’s a dank, metallic smell — something between mold and blood.
Gale holds his light beam on a cavern, lined with enormous crystals.
The largest crystals he’s ever seen, or heard of.
Some of them fifty feet high. Some calved away like icebergs to lie on the cavern floor.
Gale circles his flashlight, in disbelieving awe.
Eighty enormous crystals, he guesses. A hundred?
They’re silver-white, softly luminescent in his flashlight beam.
Some are as big around as telephone poles, he sees, with tops tapered into neat points and bottoms thickly rooted into the beach-sand-colored cavern floor.