“No chance you could make it right away?”
“You mean today?”
“The sooner the better.”
There was something in his voice that told me he had more on his mind than fishing and kicking over old times. I said as much, and then I said, “You got some sort of problem, Harry?”
“Yeah, maybe,” he admitted.
“Urgent?”
“It could be.”
“You want to tell me about it now?”
“It's a little complicated,” Harry said. “Has to do with some of the people staying at my camp. You'd have to see the situation yourself to get a real handle on it.” He paused. “Hell, I hate to come out of the blue like this after four years and ask a favor, but I don't know anybody else. And it'd be good to see you again anyway, believe that.”
“Harry-look, I just don't know. I'll have to see if I can get away. Can I call back a little later?”
“I'll be here for another hour. That enough time?”
“Maybe. If not, I could leave a message.” There were no telephones at the camp; even though it was less than five miles from The Pines, Harry liked to maintain the illusion of wilderness and isolation.
“Fair enough.” He gave me the number: The Pines General Store. “I hope you can manage it, buddy.”
“I'll call,” I said.
I put the phone down and went out into the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. I stood with it, staring down into the sink and its overflow of crusty-looking dishes.
You can't do it, I thought. You've got to go in on Tuesday and find out the results of the sputum test-find out that the lesion is benign.
Or malignant.
I don't want to know the results of that frigging test, I thought.
Tuesday.
You'll go crazy sitting around here, waiting for Tuesday.
Well, you could go up to Eden Lake and you could be back by Tuesday, couldn't you?
Unless Harry's problem took longer than that.
All right, suppose it did. I could always call White from The Pines; I did not necessarily have to go in and see him. Besides, I was in a sorry mental state right now and I needed activity, a place and a direction to concentrate my sensibilities. I had always been motivated by my work, and it was a tried and true antidote for self-pity and depression. So was fishing for lake bass and reliving some of the good moments of the past with an old friend. And I owed Harry a favor because of our friendship, if for no other reason.
Sunday morning coming down.
In the living room again I sat and stared at the walls and listened to the silence. After a while I said aloud, “You're a damned fool.” Then I got up and did what I had known all along I was going to do: I went in and called Harry Burroughs at The Pines General Store and told him I would be up later that day.
Two
The Mother Lode extends one hundred and fifty miles north and south along the western slopes of the central Sierra Nevada. In the Southern Mines of Tuolumne County, due east of Modesto where Eden Lake was located, hundreds of thousands of men had used picks, washing pans, rockers, hydraulic rams, sluices, and crude and modern machinery to extract billions of dollars' worth of placer and quartz gold during the last half of the nineteenth century. Some of the towns that had sprung up then had long since died, become ghosts or nothing at all except historical memories. Others remained to the present, carefully preserving their heritage so that tourists could peer at the old brick-and-fieldstone and false-fronted buildings, prowl the nearby abandoned diggings, and study the relics left by those who had come long ago in search of dreams. And maybe a hundred years from now, if the world lasted that long, tourists of that era would come to gape and gawk at what was left of our dreams…
The Pines was one of those towns rich in history, situated in the foothills off the Mono Highway east of Twain Harte and set against a backdrop of forested mountains and snow-capped crags thirteen thousand feet high and more. The surrounding countryside was rolling, hilly grassland and placer-pocked limestone-the town had been built on mining claims-and a spur of the Old Sierra Railroad passed through it and up into the mountains to where lumberjacks still felled trees and cut logs for the sawmills at Standard and Tuolumne.
When I came into The Pines a few minutes before three, the main street was crowded with cars and people. Traffic had been heavy all the way from San Francisco, and especially heavy into and out of Sonora on the Mono Road, mostly transient tourists and vacationers from the resorts at Long Barn and Pine Crest and local families on a Sunday outing. It was very hot, up in the nineties; the hot-metal glare of the sun made the trees on Buck Horn Hill look as though they were aflame. I had my window rolled down, and the air was redolent with the scents of pine and wood smoke and summer dust.