Tom took refuge in the routine of running the Forum, work that had to be done despite his sense that nothing was or ever could be the same following Brubaker’s death at his hands, his deepening anxiety that he could be held to account for it one way or another, and his growing certainty that he would never learn what had happened to Ray Walker. It was work so familiar he could do it by rote and for him to carry on was just another example of a man’s ability to quickly adapt to almost any contingency, just as Sarah was making peach pies a few weeks after her husband’s disappearance. Yes, Tom now knew from his own experience, you can even kill a man one day and be drenched in his blood and return to work the next day as if nothing had happened. Just so, he mused, murderers, rapists and drug dealers can easily mix with the rest of humanity, going about their mundane daily lives, utterly undetectable by any outward sign of their depravity.
The Forum was a one-man band. Tom picked up a folder containing advertising insertion orders. He would spend the morning building ads for clients, faxing proofs, and then making corrections. Tom had enjoyed doing the paper’s graphic design work, fully aware that he had no real talent for it, and equally aware that in his market it didn’t matter a bit. As a small-town paper, The Forum was entitled to look cheesy, if cheesy was the best Tom could do.
There were rarely new ads, virtually never a new customer, just changes to old ads: occasionally a new listing in the ad for Scenic Realty, the week’s blue plate special at the Maverick, the sale items at the Merc.
Deciding what to put on the front page was his most important duty. He would flip through the bigger papers from Montrose, Moab and Cortez to see if there were stories he wanted to reprint: all three papers let him use whatever he wanted, at no cost, as long as he gave them credit. They saw The Forum as no competition, and Tom’s reprinting their stories as a form of advertising. He might rewrite a press release from the Division of Wildlife or the State Highway Department or the power company, fleshing the story out with a quick phone interview if necessary. Local residents would drop off photos of newborns or of the newly deceased for publication. For the upcoming paper, Tom had a story prepared about the Radium Town Board’s debate over whether or not to purchase the abandoned former Radium Elementary School building for a future rec. center. Some members of the board saw it as a prudent investment in the future. Others saw it as scarce money down the drain since nobody else was likely to buy the building and the town had no money with which to refurbish it anyway.
“That is exactly why God invented state community development grants,” Mayor Denny said.
That was the argument that sealed the deal. Harry Denny was a perfect small-town politician, both sensible and colorful. He and Tom had lunch every couple of weeks, part of Harry’s routine of public outreach. In what passed for civic life in Radium, Tom was a player, a role he had, over the years, come to enjoy.
Denny was one of a dozen acquaintances who called Tom to ask why the paper had been late.
“I was sick and couldn’t work,” Tom said. “Just couldn’t get her done.”
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Just a bad flu.”
“You sound a little down.”
“Better now.”
“So we can have lunch.”
They met an hour later at the Maverick and made small talk until after Sally took their order.
“I’ve got some good news for you to put in your paper,” Denny said. “Highway Department is gonna straighten Dead Man’s Curve.”
“Good work, Harry.”
“Half a dozen people have gone off the road right there, right at that point, and have died in the last twenty, thirty years.” Harry dug into his Frito Pie, a ladle of canned chili con carne dumped on a pile of Fritos and topped with grated yellow cheese, raw chopped onions and shredded iceberg lettuce. “It’s a serious health-safety matter. You wouldn’t think we’d have had to fight like we did to get it fixed. But highway money always goes to Denver first.”
Tom nodded.
“Here’s even better news. I have reason to believe that the Highway Department is gonna give the contract to Brown Construction.”
“Is this official?”
“Next week.”
“I guess that is pretty big news.”
“Big as it gets around here,” Harry snorted.
It had only been a couple of weeks, but the mayor had apparently already forgotten about Ray Walker’s disappearance.
Harry hadn’t forgotten but was right, Tom thought, as he walked across the highway back to his office after lunch. A road improvement was far bigger – and far more comprehensible and meaningful to more people – than a man who’d gone missing, and whom nobody wanted to find. So why should Tom bother? The mystery had already cost him far too much, not least his deepening anxiety surrounding the Brubaker episode, which he would now carry with him forever.
“I’m finished,” he muttered, resolved that he would not give Ray Walker another moment’s consideration.
Lost in his thoughts, he was nearly run down by a vintage 1950s-era jeep executing a U-turn on the highway and lurching to a stop by the Merc. Tom strolled over for a look. The vehicle clearly dated from the uranium boom, it was a prospector’s tool as historic as a Geiger counter, and was worthy of closer examination.
Though they had never met, Tom recognized Dick DeRichter instantly from old photos. The King carefully opened the jeep door and stepped out. He was a small, stout man with a beard, stooped and looking every one of his 80-plus years. He seemed confused, an impression that was unavoidable not only because of the terry cloth bathrobe he wore for a jacket and the slippers he wore instead of shoes, but because he was entirely disheveled, his beard untrimmed, his hair askew and his shirt untucked beneath the robe.
DeRichter looked around as if he wasn’t sure where he was or why he was there. Tom approached him.
“Mr. DeRichter,” he said. “I’m Tom Austin, publisher of the Forum. What brings you to town?”
No small talk from the King: “I’m looking for miners,” he growled. He spoke with a slight, vaguely European burr, most likely a speech impediment he had learned to mask.
“Miners?”
“Yes, indeed. Where’s the tavern? Seems to me it was right around here. But I don’t remember everything like I used to.”
“The tavern shut down some years ago,” Tom said.
“That’s a shame,” DeRichter said. “We’ll have to open it back up. You could always find good men there.”
“Why do you want miners?” Tom asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Are you a miner?” the King asked.
“No, I run the newspaper.”
“Oh. You’d make a lot more money as a miner. Good benefits, too. You wanna a job? I’m reopening the Whispering Jim.”
Radium’s main street was as deserted as always, and nobody else had spotted DeRichter yet. And Tom wanted him to himself.
“Can I invite you over to my office for a quick talk,” Tom asked. “I’d like to hear all about your plans. Maybe I can write about it in the newspaper and help you find the miners you need.”
DeRichter was compliant, apparently accustomed to being led, and he followed Tom to the Forum office.
He stopped when he saw the yellowed poster of Ray Walker in the window. He studied it for a moment as if the image of his son was familiar, but impossible to place.
“That’s your son Ray, Mr. DeRichter,” Tom said. “He’s gone missing.”
“Oh.”
“Have you got any idea where he is?”
“No.”
Tom ushered DeRichter inside and showed him to a chair.
“Uranium….” Tom started, pronouncing it like a question.
“Uranium is coming back, of course. I always knew it would come back someday. The price is rising on world markets and the Whispering Jim is not mined out. Not even close.”
If the King was confused about where he was and didn’t recognize his missing son, he was sharp on the subject of uranium.
“You’re not one of them damned radical environmentalists, are you?” DeRichter asked. “Of course you are! I’ve got nothing against environmentalists. I’ve made a lot of money off of ’em, and now I’m gonna make a lot more.”
“I’m just a newspaperman.”
“The joke is on them, on the Earth Firsters,” DeRichter said. “You know this is a great country, don’t you … Who are you again?”
“Tom.”
“Tom,” DeRichter nodded. “Yep. First the guv’ment paid us to mine and mill uranium to fight the Japs and the Russians, back in the forties and fifties, and then they turned around and paid us to shut it all down and bury all the tailings. And now we’re gonna make more money starting all over again. We’ll end up mining the same tailings we buried using new technology to extract what we missed when we processed the ore the first time!”
He pronounced guv’ment the way Ronald Reagan used to, slurring the word to show his contempt for it.
“You know why uranium is coming back, don’t you? Global warming, even if it is a damned hoax. Uranium is the only solution, the only practical solution, if people really want to get away from carbon. Uranium’s the only way to generate enough energy to meet the world’s demand. I can’t tell you that twenty, thirty years ago when the environmentalists shut us down that I knew they’d come up with global warming. I don’t think anyone did. But I always knew uranium would come back, somehow, someday, because it’s just too valuable a source of energy for mankind to ignore it.”
“Makes sense.”
Tom had grabbed a reporter’s notebook and was scribbling notes.
“Plus oil is running out,” DeRichter continued. “Even if there’s plenny of domestic coal and natural gas, there’s not enough domestic oil. So I’m coming out of retirement and we’re going to bring the West End back to what it once was. We’re going to create good jobs. Real jobs. Meaningful jobs. Jobs a man can support his family on. Not jobs changing the diapers on rich tourists up in Telluride.”
“Open the movie drive-in back up.”
“Well, yes, we’ll do that, too,” DeRichter said.
“I thought uranium mining ended around here because it wasn’t economical,” Tom said. “Because the ore was too low-grade and too hard to mill.”
“Bullshit! The price dropped and the costs of extraction and milling went out of sight due to damned guv’ment regulations that the environmentalists made ’em adopt. People stopped building nuclear power plants and the guv’ment had more bombs than they knew what to do with. But that was all right because we got into the clean-up business. Now the price is back up and it’s going higher. Much higher. So we’ll get back in the mining business.
“What a lot of people don’t understand is that the foreign ore in Canada and Australia is too damned rich,” DeRichter continued. “It’s so damned hot that human beings can’t mine it and they have to extract it with robots. And people forget that uranium is a strategic resource and the United States cannot allow itself to depend on foreign supplies, or we’ll end up just like we have with petroleum, dependent on A-rabs and terrorists.”
“When do you figure the Whispering Jim will be operating again?”
“It will take a few months to ramp up, that’s all. We’ve kept everything in working order. Mine looks today pretty much the way it did the day we shut ’er down. We’ll just pick up where we left off. Turn on the lights and start digging.”
“How many people will you be hiring?
“I figure to start with a dozen or so.”
“Where are you going to ship the ore?”
“Blanding mill for now,” DeRichter said. “But if it goes as I expect it will, we’ll reopen the mill here and create even more good jobs. It only makes sense to mill the ore close to where you mine it. Now I realize that it will take all sorts of guv’ment approvals, and the damned environmentalists will cry about it, so it won’t happen overnight….”
“Are you doing all this yourself?”
“I have always operated independently, Mr…. Who are you again?”
“Tom. Newspaper publisher.”
DeRichter leaned back in the chair.
“My son, Albert, wants me to retire,” he said. “Says my time is past and I should just let him run everything. Says we have better business opportunities. Better than mining. Says I don’t understand that the world has changed. But I’m not ready for that. I’m old, but I still know a thing or two about uranium.”
“I’ve had an interest in the history of uranium mining,” Tom said.
“That right?”
“How you found the Whispering Jim…”
“Never give up,” DeRichter said. “That’s what I always told my boys. When you know something is right, you stick with it, no matter what anyone else says.”
“Dangerous work, prospecting and mining,” Tom said. “I can’t believe how Whispering Jim cut off his own arm. How do you suppose the two of you got separated out there in Iberia Canyon? Nobody’s written down the details of that. It’s all kind of vague in the history books.”
“He slipped,” DeRichter said. “Jim slipped.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him slip.”
“Papers said you just lost him.”
“I did lose him. After he slipped.”
“Do you remember it all?”
“Like it was yesterday.”
“You ever tell anyone the whole story?
“Nope.”
Was the old man prepared to confess?
“I tried to imagine what might have happened out there,” Tom said. “Tell me if I’m right.”
“Mebbe.”
“I figure maybe it started with an accident, and Jim fell and was injured, got trapped by a boulder and there wasn’t anything you could do about it, to save Jim, so you left him to die there. But you didn’t want to tell anyone the whole story because you were afraid maybe they wouldn’t believe you.”
“That’s not exactly right.”
“No?”
“We got into it,” DeRichter said. “Him and me. We were tired. Discouraged. Sick of each other. It was hard work. We were all alone. We’d been out there, just the two of us, for a whole lot of weeks, for a whole lot of years. Damned drill kept breaking on us. We were about to call it quits. He said I was a damned fool. He wanted out. I told him that would be fine with me. So he took off. I told him he’d better not try to come back.
“But I didn’t quit. I got the drill going and kept digging. And the next core sample was hot. And the one after that was even hotter. Hotter than any carnotite anyone around here had ever seen. Geiger counter was going nuts. And right then, I’ll be damned if Jim doesn’t show up again, like nothing had happened, like we was still partners.”
“I guess you weren’t glad to see him.”
“He’d quit. That claim was mine now. It was me, all by myself, I’m the one that went the full distance. I’m the one who didn’t quit. Not him. You walk away when it’s toughest, you’re gone. That’s always how it’s always been when you’re prospecting.”
“Is that when he slipped?” Tom asked.
“I told him. We were heading back to town with our samples. I told him it was my claim. Not his. He’d walked away. I told him he could have a piece of it, but not half. He gave up his claim to half. And then he took a swing at me. We were wrassling. That’s when he slipped.”
“He fell?”
“Yep. Right down into that slot canyon there, right where they found the bones later.”
“Did the fall kill him?”
“Nope. Just banged him up some.”
“So you pushed the rock down there to finish him off?
“It was him or me.”
“And you never told anyone what happened?”
“Never did before.”
“Why did you just tell me?”
“Don’t matter no more, I guess, and somebody ought to know. It’s history.”
They sat silently for a moment.
“You know, Mr. DeRichter, I appreciate hearing the story,” Tom said. “I’m glad I’m the one you told it to.”
The door opened.
“There you are!” a young woman said. “We’ve been worried sick!”
She turned to Tom.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said. “I’m Melody Anderson. I work for the DeRichters, up at the ranch.”
“Nice to meet you,” Tom said.
“Mr. DeRichter wanders off sometimes, but he’s never gone this far from home,” she explained. “He’s never gone off in his jeep at all. I can’t guess where he found the key.”
“Mr. DeRichter seems to be just fine,” Tom said. “We’ve been having a very nice talk about uranium mining.”
“That’s nice,” she smiled. “He likes to remember the olden days. Thank you for taking care of him. Let’s go home, Mr. DeRichter.”
The King meekly followed his caretaker out the door.