TALC
Martin Higgins
I had taken all the heat I could by late afternoon, cooped inside the SUV with its puny air conditioner. In the Bay Area, it had worked well, blowing flecks of ice from its dashboard vents and chilling me to the point of nose-numbness. Here in the barrens, it only cooled the one hundred fifteen-degree heat down to a begrudged ninety.
Despite the relatively cool airflow from the vents, the dashboard and steering wheel were fiery-hot to the touch. At this temperature, the plastic interior surfaces released volatile organic vapors. They may be hazardous, but more importantly, I find them downright irritating. Without considering the consequences, I burned some cedar and sage sprigs in front of the vent breeze to supplant the plastic smell with something less noxious. The combination of heat and dense, sanctifying smoke, while a more fitting incense, compelled me to get out of the car and take in some fresh air.
Then the road widened enough to pull off onto a solid shoulder, near a sign that had lost its words to the weather. Behind it, two windblown shacks leaned hazardously close to toppling. I parked on the windward side of and set out to survey a high ridge that towered over them. As I drew closer, I saw a door set into the face of a blanched cliff.
The wooden door was marked with the word “CANCER” in flaking paint, the color of dried blood. The wood looked worse for wear; its grain raised high and splintery from the ceaseless progression of sun, wind, and rain. There was no lock or bar to prevent me from entering or restrain whatever hid behind the door. I had no idea why someone would leave such a warning. But, this was Death Valley – and death is responsible for more than half its fame.
Two small windows flanked the cancer door. Each was cross-framed with raw wood mullions and their panes, occluded with fine white dust, afforded no glimpse of the danger that waited within. More puzzling than the door and windows was their location, skillfully inserted in the waxy, gray wall of the escarpment that rose thirty-odd feet above my head.
Cancer? Oh well, cancer takes time. Time I have. Anyway, it beats swatting cave bats or spiders or snakes.
With barely a touch, the door swung open on sagging hinges, carving a fresh, hairline groove into the chalk powder floor. A top hinge screw pulled out, adding a weary sag to the door’s sweep until it scraped to a stop. The room was lit only by the light of the doorway and a soft glow from the dusty windows.
The cave was a squared space with a domed ceiling, hewn out of the same gray-white mineral as the cliff face. Its surface was a mosaic of small indentations, dimpled cuts that suggested untold hours of hard labor with an adze or hatchet. Carved alcoves dotted the walls, and an arched passageway opened to another smaller room. A large soot spot on the ceiling.
This was a dwelling; someone lived here.
The soot smudge must have been from a lantern, for there was no electrical wiring to be found. And no furniture, other than a wooden table made of rough-sawn pieces of packing crate lumber. It leaned to one side on a short leg, offering an inclined top that matched the unconventional geometry of the walls. More a grotto than a room; it had shelves and storage space carved into its soft grey walls. One large hollow might have been a place to sleep; others – smaller and at waist level – probably provided space for storage.
Just below the beginning of the vaulted ceiling, I saw a long gouge only a few inches high. In it I found a small stack of hand-drawn playing cards on scrap cardboard. I fanned out the crude sketches, the diamonds and spades, clubs and hearts, and held the hand; a testament to poverty, isolation, boredom, and the need to pass time with any diversion to forget a bad deal or lost love. It was not a full deck, at most a couple dozen of the dog-eared pasteboards, and I thumbed through them in mild amusement, smirking at the child-like, inelegant pips.
Until I saw the face cards.
The Queen was drawn with marked skill, clearly rendered and precise. Her face bore the same hardship-enduring grace that shines forth from black and white photos of dustbowl mothers, burdened with the weight of deprivation and labor but somehow unbeaten by life’s dizzy dance with death. The Jack pasteboard presented a gaunt, vulpine knave, his eye’s squinting under hooded lids, his smile twisted in a sardonic scowl that suggested cunning and immorality; obviously a proud villain.
I fanned out the rest of the thin stack to find the King. I stopped, transfixed, when I finally saw him. I might as well have been holding a mirror.
Beneath a simple, branch-entangled, bejeweled crown was the face of a man lost in thought. His eyes set on some distant perimeter, not of his land, but some future scape that was less barren and ephemeral than this cave palace, some other kingdom where men didn’t have to live in caves and scratch out their major arcana on dockets of scrap paper. A prospect where Queens don’t wither and fade, crushed by misfortune and ravaged by despair. The King longs for a rightful fiefdom where Jack meets his better and is reformed by a stronger will; disciplined into lawfulness, and reconciled to trustworthiness.
The monarch was looking into the distance to find himself, his countenance burdened by the thorny brambles that snake through his royal gardens, the climbing ivy that endlessly pulls down the walls of his citadel – sucking away tiny foothold pocks of stone – dispassionate in its unknowing destruction.
All around, there is discord. The cows gave sour milk. The mares birth monsters. The people lose their minds, their spoons, and their way.
I know this man well. I know his abashed tribulations, his weighty heartache, his intractable distress as his kingdom turns to dust and the winds rise.
I wear that crown
But, by choosing to visit this desolate wasteland, I commit to enter the cauldron and willingly risk everything I left at home. This is my gamble to induce rejuvenation, find a new path, and belay my crippling bereavement.
I looked down at the floor and toed the pearly dust. This is not my fate. This is not my kingdom.
So, I carefully shuffled the cards, straightened the deck, and placed them back on the high shelf. The dust on my fingers felt familiar like the fanning powder cardsharks use to make a deck glide smoothly, like the baby powder I used when my daughters we infants.
Talc. Another piece of my evolving myth.
The archway before me opened to a smaller room devoid of niches and hollows in its walls. Here, the walls were less smooth, looking as though it was formed hastily and left unfinished. Very little light entered the room but in the dim luminescence, I could see the floor was littered with papers and several more rusted tin cans. One large can, flattened at its rim, held a ragged scrap of its yellowed label. “Monarch Pork & B” it read, with just enough of the attending image remaining to see a cluster of the beans the tin once contained.
Who lived here? Who endured the inexorable heat? Who breathed in and coughed out the pearly dust? Who created the dim cave rooms and supped on pork bean meals?
I walked out through the doorway and turned to reflect on what I had just seen. Once again, the faded, peeled paint CANCER on the door enthralled me. Someone had flagged the place with this warning, named it a death disease, and conjured a painful, lingering demise. A fear-filled realization shook me. Was I looking at the entrance to a crypt, a sepulcher with playing cards and tin cans? I breathed out a prayer – Requiescat in Pace – to no one in particular.
Some ingrained sense of responsibility took over and, out of a reasoned obligation to propriety, I secured the door as I would my own home and turned to leave the… dare I call it a home? It was a cave; a shelter. What is it that makes a shelter a home?
Back on the main road, crazed with tarred cracks, I drove north, looking for clues along the way. Perhaps a slapdash sign with a name or a ramshackle landmark that hinted at some piece of information that served the myth I was assembling in my mind. Anything new inclusion might fit into my impromptu parable, even a forsaken cemetery with tombstones from long-gone years when brief descriptions were added to names and dates
“Remember, Man, as you go by, as you are, once was I. As I am now, so shall you be. Prepare yourself to follow me.” or “Beloved husband, lost to affliction.” or “To live in hearts we leave behind - is not to die.” T
There is no formal methodology to my shadow story search, just a willingness to breathe it all in and let it settle inside my mind, like swirling grains of sand blown in from an endless, wind-whipped beach.
And yet, my mind imposed a narrative, eager to force enlightenment. I am an impatient seeker, longing to settle my soul.
Many miles up the road, I saw a railroad caboose, landlocked and conjoined with a long, tin-roofed cabin. Atop the caboose was a single word, formed of welded scrap metal. “SPIRITS”
I parked at the shack and climbed rusted metal stairs to the planked platform that served as the store's front entrance porch. Inside, I found a bare-bones liquor store with no one at the counter. Desert guidebooks filled a wall rack beside a coathook rack a few hats and tuquise
The rack contained little that anything specific to local history. Most were geared to visiting popular area attractions. The door swung open, and a gruff-looking man stepped in.
“Sorry!” he said, striding to the counter. “Bar’s happening. I'm covering both.”
Bar? Maybe a cold beer is in order.
“Bar?”
“Yeah. Can’t serve and sell off-premises in the same building. Bar’s next door.”
“Let’s do that.” I said. “Hate to drink alone.”
We headed out to the place where the spirits were dispensed and an hour later, I had let go of my story about the talc cave and slowly breathed in the truth.
A jangling doorbell sounded as we opened the door and then again when it closed. The cabin was little more than a long oak top bar with a row of metal tractor-seat stools. A long steel railroad rail served as a bar-long footrest set just above the floor. A couple of grubby day drinkers, cowboys in wrangler attire, were hard at it, mumbling to each other about some common gripe. They looked like father and son – having the same weathered features below straw cowboy hats. The old guy’s hat had a fan of owl feathers on its front, held firm by a tooled leather band. He noticed me looking at it, and when our eyes met, he held his gaze a bit too long for comfort, then nodded almost imperceptibly, the silent howdy that rural folk do with strangers.
All the while, his son never looked up from the bar top and kept complaining, muttering something about surgery and pain. The old guy turned back to him and rejoined their grousing.
A window-mounted evaporative cooler blew dank air into the room, earning its swamp cooler nickname by filling the room with the stench of a roadside bog on a humid day. Mixed with years of spilled beers on the caboose's dirty sawdust floors and the acrid bite of day-in, day-out barfly sweat, the clammy breeze produced the taproom’s signature miasma.
The first whiff of its foul breath evoked spirits far more arresting than the booze caboose’s junkyard iron sign. I recalled my childhood spent in bar rooms as my parents drank and joked and fought and sang.
My desire for cold beer was mirrored by the cowboy’s long line of empty longnecks alongside the one he was nursing. I felt like having a cold beer too – and getting some answers about the talc hovel. I might find what I was looking for by listening to local stories – usually the stock-in-trade small talk of bartenders. I sat at the far end of the bar, allowing enough distance from the cowboys to avoid intruding on their pow-wow.
The bartender presented well, with a haphazard toupee I had failed to notice in the caboose, a threadbare brown vest over an ordinary undershirt, and a mouth full of over-sized, overly-white teeth that pronounced a denture whistle when he spoke. His leathery face had enough sun damage and smoker wrinkles to identify him as a deep-rooted desert native. He had to know about the cave.
I called him over. “Excuse me. What’ve you got on tap?”
“Just bottles.’’ He said, a little too upbeat, as though that was a bonus.
“Then I’ll have what he’s having.” pointing at the younger cowboy.
“The two-fer?” he said. “They’re cheaper two at a time. Longnecks are a buck seventy-five each or two for three dollars.”
That’s weird. Hell, go with the flow.
“Sounds right. Gimme two.”
The walls were covered with old farm equipment, mounted hunting trophies, and train memorabilia; crossing signs, lanterns, and a battered station clock with hands in the predictable ten minutes to two o’clock position. Under the clock was a placard that read; “Last Call Is Two O’clock.” Jokers.
I chatted with the barkeep about the farm equipment and trains, then steered the conversation to the town and my travels. He was polite enough, introducing himself as Sonny, but seemed preoccupied with backbar set-up until I asked about the talc caves.
“Stay out of them. They’re dangerous. Did you see the sign?”
“Yeah I saw it from the road, but the words were too faded to read.”
“Nah, on the door… danger.”
“Yeah, that I saw. Cancer, eh?”
“No the danger door.”
I shrugged. “Must have missed it. I saw cancer.”
Then, he shrugged and shook it off with upraised palms and eyebrows.
“Anywhoo, those rooms can collapse, and anyone in them would be shit out of luck. We had one give way two months ago. Cave nuts started picking at the walls, and a big chunk of ceiling pinned one guy down. If there wasn’t two of them, he’dve been dead. No search and rescue here since the county went bust.”
I let the story hang in the air a moment, then asked, “What about the cancer?”
He looked at me blankly and said, “I don’t know.”
The old cowboy took an interest in our conversation and spoke up. slurring.
“Stay the Hell out of them. They’re condemned. And. if you don’t get killed, you’ll wind up in jail. Thousand dollars easy.” Having said his piece, his voice trailed off, and he went back to grumbling with the other cowboy.
The bartender turned to me. "He said, stay out of them, they’re condemned. You can get arrested and get a thousand-dollar fine.”
Struck by the repetition, I looked back to the old cowboy. He was gone. The young guy was still rambling, talking to himself. He was alone but answering his own questions, sounding drunk and schizophrenic.
I didn’t hear the doorbell, and the old guy would have to pass behind me to get back to the toilet… where the Hell is he?
My beers were getting warm so I drank, half-listening to the bartender tell me about the Mystery of the Lost Gold Mine.
“Here’s how it goes. Two Paiute brothers found a limestone cave next to a dry lake in Death Valley. It was a dome-shaped cavern with a dark pool of water at the bottom. Water gurgled up though a big hole in the ground, mixed with black sand that formed piles around pool. So, the water went up and down, splashing out all over. Well, they couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw gold flickering in the sand. Little flakes and tiny nuggets, yeah, but lots of them! The water was cool and since it was really hot outside, one of the brothers decided to take a quick swim. The other guy saw all the gold, got greedy, and tried to drown his brother. Dove in and started shoving his brother’s head under the water. They fought for a minute or so and… suddenly the water got sucked back underground pulling the men to their death. Neither body was ever recovered. That’s the mystery. That, and where the cave is.”
“…and who saw what happened?” I asked.
“Well, somebody, I guess. But it is an Indian legend, right? So… who knows?”
The door opened, ringing the bell, and a deliveryman carried in a box.
“Aquirre?”
The bartender squinted at the box, “He’s in at six. I can sign for it.”
I took this interruption as a good time to leave, so I finished my beer and headed toward the door.
“Take `er easy!” the bartender said.
“Yup. You too.” I replied, glancing back at him and the deliveryman. I stood there staring at the mirrored wall behind them. There, on a glass shelf just above whisky bottles, was the old cowboy’s hat – owl feathers, tooled leather and all. Exact. And, from the angle I was looking at it, the young cowboy’s reflection was right below it, looking as if he was wearing the hat.
Must be a popular style. I thought, The old guy just leaves his hat? Makes no sense.
“Excuse me…” I said to the bartender, “Know where I can get a hat like that?”
He pointed to the young cowboy, who stopped mumbling and turned to face me.
“My father made it. Just a Bangora open-crown. Find your own feathers.”
“Is that one for sale?”
“No…” he snapped.
“Well, thanks. Have a good day.” I waved to them all and walked.
The cowboy called after me, “That was my Dad’s…”
A blast of heat smacked me as I opened the door. It made my face get pins and needles as the bell rang.
I drove back to the caves, thinking about the talc and its distant relationship to asbestos.
My grandfather was a shipyard insulation installer who handled mats of the fibrous mineral and developed pleural mesothelioma. Occasionally, talc can be contaminated with asbestos during the mining process. That might be the reason for the word cancer on the door. But the bartender would have known that. Why did he play dumb?
The sun was high when I got back to the tumbledown shacks and the cliffside door. Looking closer at the faded road sign, I could make out some of the faint letters that remained of the sunbeaten plywood, Contiene Fibres De Asbesto. So, that was it. Mesothelioma. Cancer.
I stood close to the door and focused my camera on cancer. I was wrong.
The raised grain of the wood had sloughed off more of the vertical lines of paint than the horizontal, which were sunk into the troughs of the grain. Two faint lines became clear in my viewfinder; an upright line rising behind the first “c” making it a lowercase “d” and a curving downward stroke after the second “c” made it a lazy “g”.
So, cancer became danger.
I drove off to find a place to bed down for the night.
- end -
copyright © 2023
Martin Higgins
all rights reserved
Despite the relatively cool airflow from the vents, the dashboard and steering wheel were fiery-hot to the touch. At this temperature, the plastic interior surfaces released volatile organic vapors. They may be hazardous, but more importantly, I find them downright irritating. Without considering the consequences, I burned some cedar and sage sprigs in front of the vent breeze to supplant the plastic smell with something less noxious. The combination of heat and dense, sanctifying smoke, while a more fitting incense, compelled me to get out of the car and take in some fresh air.
Then the road widened enough to pull off onto a solid shoulder, near a sign that had lost its words to the weather. Behind it, two windblown shacks leaned hazardously close to toppling. I parked on the windward side of and set out to survey a high ridge that towered over them. As I drew closer, I saw a door set into the face of a blanched cliff.
The wooden door was marked with the word “CANCER” in flaking paint, the color of dried blood. The wood looked worse for wear; its grain raised high and splintery from the ceaseless progression of sun, wind, and rain. There was no lock or bar to prevent me from entering or restrain whatever hid behind the door. I had no idea why someone would leave such a warning. But, this was Death Valley – and death is responsible for more than half its fame.
Two small windows flanked the cancer door. Each was cross-framed with raw wood mullions and their panes, occluded with fine white dust, afforded no glimpse of the danger that waited within. More puzzling than the door and windows was their location, skillfully inserted in the waxy, gray wall of the escarpment that rose thirty-odd feet above my head.
Cancer? Oh well, cancer takes time. Time I have. Anyway, it beats swatting cave bats or spiders or snakes.
With barely a touch, the door swung open on sagging hinges, carving a fresh, hairline groove into the chalk powder floor. A top hinge screw pulled out, adding a weary sag to the door’s sweep until it scraped to a stop. The room was lit only by the light of the doorway and a soft glow from the dusty windows.
The cave was a squared space with a domed ceiling, hewn out of the same gray-white mineral as the cliff face. Its surface was a mosaic of small indentations, dimpled cuts that suggested untold hours of hard labor with an adze or hatchet. Carved alcoves dotted the walls, and an arched passageway opened to another smaller room. A large soot spot on the ceiling.
This was a dwelling; someone lived here.
The soot smudge must have been from a lantern, for there was no electrical wiring to be found. And no furniture, other than a wooden table made of rough-sawn pieces of packing crate lumber. It leaned to one side on a short leg, offering an inclined top that matched the unconventional geometry of the walls. More a grotto than a room; it had shelves and storage space carved into its soft grey walls. One large hollow might have been a place to sleep; others – smaller and at waist level – probably provided space for storage.
Just below the beginning of the vaulted ceiling, I saw a long gouge only a few inches high. In it I found a small stack of hand-drawn playing cards on scrap cardboard. I fanned out the crude sketches, the diamonds and spades, clubs and hearts, and held the hand; a testament to poverty, isolation, boredom, and the need to pass time with any diversion to forget a bad deal or lost love. It was not a full deck, at most a couple dozen of the dog-eared pasteboards, and I thumbed through them in mild amusement, smirking at the child-like, inelegant pips.
Until I saw the face cards.
The Queen was drawn with marked skill, clearly rendered and precise. Her face bore the same hardship-enduring grace that shines forth from black and white photos of dustbowl mothers, burdened with the weight of deprivation and labor but somehow unbeaten by life’s dizzy dance with death. The Jack pasteboard presented a gaunt, vulpine knave, his eye’s squinting under hooded lids, his smile twisted in a sardonic scowl that suggested cunning and immorality; obviously a proud villain.
I fanned out the rest of the thin stack to find the King. I stopped, transfixed, when I finally saw him. I might as well have been holding a mirror.
Beneath a simple, branch-entangled, bejeweled crown was the face of a man lost in thought. His eyes set on some distant perimeter, not of his land, but some future scape that was less barren and ephemeral than this cave palace, some other kingdom where men didn’t have to live in caves and scratch out their major arcana on dockets of scrap paper. A prospect where Queens don’t wither and fade, crushed by misfortune and ravaged by despair. The King longs for a rightful fiefdom where Jack meets his better and is reformed by a stronger will; disciplined into lawfulness, and reconciled to trustworthiness.
The monarch was looking into the distance to find himself, his countenance burdened by the thorny brambles that snake through his royal gardens, the climbing ivy that endlessly pulls down the walls of his citadel – sucking away tiny foothold pocks of stone – dispassionate in its unknowing destruction.
All around, there is discord. The cows gave sour milk. The mares birth monsters. The people lose their minds, their spoons, and their way.
I know this man well. I know his abashed tribulations, his weighty heartache, his intractable distress as his kingdom turns to dust and the winds rise.
I wear that crown
But, by choosing to visit this desolate wasteland, I commit to enter the cauldron and willingly risk everything I left at home. This is my gamble to induce rejuvenation, find a new path, and belay my crippling bereavement.
I looked down at the floor and toed the pearly dust. This is not my fate. This is not my kingdom.
So, I carefully shuffled the cards, straightened the deck, and placed them back on the high shelf. The dust on my fingers felt familiar like the fanning powder cardsharks use to make a deck glide smoothly, like the baby powder I used when my daughters we infants.
Talc. Another piece of my evolving myth.
The archway before me opened to a smaller room devoid of niches and hollows in its walls. Here, the walls were less smooth, looking as though it was formed hastily and left unfinished. Very little light entered the room but in the dim luminescence, I could see the floor was littered with papers and several more rusted tin cans. One large can, flattened at its rim, held a ragged scrap of its yellowed label. “Monarch Pork & B” it read, with just enough of the attending image remaining to see a cluster of the beans the tin once contained.
Who lived here? Who endured the inexorable heat? Who breathed in and coughed out the pearly dust? Who created the dim cave rooms and supped on pork bean meals?
I walked out through the doorway and turned to reflect on what I had just seen. Once again, the faded, peeled paint CANCER on the door enthralled me. Someone had flagged the place with this warning, named it a death disease, and conjured a painful, lingering demise. A fear-filled realization shook me. Was I looking at the entrance to a crypt, a sepulcher with playing cards and tin cans? I breathed out a prayer – Requiescat in Pace – to no one in particular.
Some ingrained sense of responsibility took over and, out of a reasoned obligation to propriety, I secured the door as I would my own home and turned to leave the… dare I call it a home? It was a cave; a shelter. What is it that makes a shelter a home?
Back on the main road, crazed with tarred cracks, I drove north, looking for clues along the way. Perhaps a slapdash sign with a name or a ramshackle landmark that hinted at some piece of information that served the myth I was assembling in my mind. Anything new inclusion might fit into my impromptu parable, even a forsaken cemetery with tombstones from long-gone years when brief descriptions were added to names and dates
“Remember, Man, as you go by, as you are, once was I. As I am now, so shall you be. Prepare yourself to follow me.” or “Beloved husband, lost to affliction.” or “To live in hearts we leave behind - is not to die.” T
There is no formal methodology to my shadow story search, just a willingness to breathe it all in and let it settle inside my mind, like swirling grains of sand blown in from an endless, wind-whipped beach.
And yet, my mind imposed a narrative, eager to force enlightenment. I am an impatient seeker, longing to settle my soul.
Many miles up the road, I saw a railroad caboose, landlocked and conjoined with a long, tin-roofed cabin. Atop the caboose was a single word, formed of welded scrap metal. “SPIRITS”
I parked at the shack and climbed rusted metal stairs to the planked platform that served as the store's front entrance porch. Inside, I found a bare-bones liquor store with no one at the counter. Desert guidebooks filled a wall rack beside a coathook rack a few hats and tuquise
The rack contained little that anything specific to local history. Most were geared to visiting popular area attractions. The door swung open, and a gruff-looking man stepped in.
“Sorry!” he said, striding to the counter. “Bar’s happening. I'm covering both.”
Bar? Maybe a cold beer is in order.
“Bar?”
“Yeah. Can’t serve and sell off-premises in the same building. Bar’s next door.”
“Let’s do that.” I said. “Hate to drink alone.”
We headed out to the place where the spirits were dispensed and an hour later, I had let go of my story about the talc cave and slowly breathed in the truth.
A jangling doorbell sounded as we opened the door and then again when it closed. The cabin was little more than a long oak top bar with a row of metal tractor-seat stools. A long steel railroad rail served as a bar-long footrest set just above the floor. A couple of grubby day drinkers, cowboys in wrangler attire, were hard at it, mumbling to each other about some common gripe. They looked like father and son – having the same weathered features below straw cowboy hats. The old guy’s hat had a fan of owl feathers on its front, held firm by a tooled leather band. He noticed me looking at it, and when our eyes met, he held his gaze a bit too long for comfort, then nodded almost imperceptibly, the silent howdy that rural folk do with strangers.
All the while, his son never looked up from the bar top and kept complaining, muttering something about surgery and pain. The old guy turned back to him and rejoined their grousing.
A window-mounted evaporative cooler blew dank air into the room, earning its swamp cooler nickname by filling the room with the stench of a roadside bog on a humid day. Mixed with years of spilled beers on the caboose's dirty sawdust floors and the acrid bite of day-in, day-out barfly sweat, the clammy breeze produced the taproom’s signature miasma.
The first whiff of its foul breath evoked spirits far more arresting than the booze caboose’s junkyard iron sign. I recalled my childhood spent in bar rooms as my parents drank and joked and fought and sang.
My desire for cold beer was mirrored by the cowboy’s long line of empty longnecks alongside the one he was nursing. I felt like having a cold beer too – and getting some answers about the talc hovel. I might find what I was looking for by listening to local stories – usually the stock-in-trade small talk of bartenders. I sat at the far end of the bar, allowing enough distance from the cowboys to avoid intruding on their pow-wow.
The bartender presented well, with a haphazard toupee I had failed to notice in the caboose, a threadbare brown vest over an ordinary undershirt, and a mouth full of over-sized, overly-white teeth that pronounced a denture whistle when he spoke. His leathery face had enough sun damage and smoker wrinkles to identify him as a deep-rooted desert native. He had to know about the cave.
I called him over. “Excuse me. What’ve you got on tap?”
“Just bottles.’’ He said, a little too upbeat, as though that was a bonus.
“Then I’ll have what he’s having.” pointing at the younger cowboy.
“The two-fer?” he said. “They’re cheaper two at a time. Longnecks are a buck seventy-five each or two for three dollars.”
That’s weird. Hell, go with the flow.
“Sounds right. Gimme two.”
The walls were covered with old farm equipment, mounted hunting trophies, and train memorabilia; crossing signs, lanterns, and a battered station clock with hands in the predictable ten minutes to two o’clock position. Under the clock was a placard that read; “Last Call Is Two O’clock.” Jokers.
I chatted with the barkeep about the farm equipment and trains, then steered the conversation to the town and my travels. He was polite enough, introducing himself as Sonny, but seemed preoccupied with backbar set-up until I asked about the talc caves.
“Stay out of them. They’re dangerous. Did you see the sign?”
“Yeah I saw it from the road, but the words were too faded to read.”
“Nah, on the door… danger.”
“Yeah, that I saw. Cancer, eh?”
“No the danger door.”
I shrugged. “Must have missed it. I saw cancer.”
Then, he shrugged and shook it off with upraised palms and eyebrows.
“Anywhoo, those rooms can collapse, and anyone in them would be shit out of luck. We had one give way two months ago. Cave nuts started picking at the walls, and a big chunk of ceiling pinned one guy down. If there wasn’t two of them, he’dve been dead. No search and rescue here since the county went bust.”
I let the story hang in the air a moment, then asked, “What about the cancer?”
He looked at me blankly and said, “I don’t know.”
The old cowboy took an interest in our conversation and spoke up. slurring.
“Stay the Hell out of them. They’re condemned. And. if you don’t get killed, you’ll wind up in jail. Thousand dollars easy.” Having said his piece, his voice trailed off, and he went back to grumbling with the other cowboy.
The bartender turned to me. "He said, stay out of them, they’re condemned. You can get arrested and get a thousand-dollar fine.”
Struck by the repetition, I looked back to the old cowboy. He was gone. The young guy was still rambling, talking to himself. He was alone but answering his own questions, sounding drunk and schizophrenic.
I didn’t hear the doorbell, and the old guy would have to pass behind me to get back to the toilet… where the Hell is he?
My beers were getting warm so I drank, half-listening to the bartender tell me about the Mystery of the Lost Gold Mine.
“Here’s how it goes. Two Paiute brothers found a limestone cave next to a dry lake in Death Valley. It was a dome-shaped cavern with a dark pool of water at the bottom. Water gurgled up though a big hole in the ground, mixed with black sand that formed piles around pool. So, the water went up and down, splashing out all over. Well, they couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw gold flickering in the sand. Little flakes and tiny nuggets, yeah, but lots of them! The water was cool and since it was really hot outside, one of the brothers decided to take a quick swim. The other guy saw all the gold, got greedy, and tried to drown his brother. Dove in and started shoving his brother’s head under the water. They fought for a minute or so and… suddenly the water got sucked back underground pulling the men to their death. Neither body was ever recovered. That’s the mystery. That, and where the cave is.”
“…and who saw what happened?” I asked.
“Well, somebody, I guess. But it is an Indian legend, right? So… who knows?”
The door opened, ringing the bell, and a deliveryman carried in a box.
“Aquirre?”
The bartender squinted at the box, “He’s in at six. I can sign for it.”
I took this interruption as a good time to leave, so I finished my beer and headed toward the door.
“Take `er easy!” the bartender said.
“Yup. You too.” I replied, glancing back at him and the deliveryman. I stood there staring at the mirrored wall behind them. There, on a glass shelf just above whisky bottles, was the old cowboy’s hat – owl feathers, tooled leather and all. Exact. And, from the angle I was looking at it, the young cowboy’s reflection was right below it, looking as if he was wearing the hat.
Must be a popular style. I thought, The old guy just leaves his hat? Makes no sense.
“Excuse me…” I said to the bartender, “Know where I can get a hat like that?”
He pointed to the young cowboy, who stopped mumbling and turned to face me.
“My father made it. Just a Bangora open-crown. Find your own feathers.”
“Is that one for sale?”
“No…” he snapped.
“Well, thanks. Have a good day.” I waved to them all and walked.
The cowboy called after me, “That was my Dad’s…”
A blast of heat smacked me as I opened the door. It made my face get pins and needles as the bell rang.
I drove back to the caves, thinking about the talc and its distant relationship to asbestos.
My grandfather was a shipyard insulation installer who handled mats of the fibrous mineral and developed pleural mesothelioma. Occasionally, talc can be contaminated with asbestos during the mining process. That might be the reason for the word cancer on the door. But the bartender would have known that. Why did he play dumb?
The sun was high when I got back to the tumbledown shacks and the cliffside door. Looking closer at the faded road sign, I could make out some of the faint letters that remained of the sunbeaten plywood, Contiene Fibres De Asbesto. So, that was it. Mesothelioma. Cancer.
I stood close to the door and focused my camera on cancer. I was wrong.
The raised grain of the wood had sloughed off more of the vertical lines of paint than the horizontal, which were sunk into the troughs of the grain. Two faint lines became clear in my viewfinder; an upright line rising behind the first “c” making it a lowercase “d” and a curving downward stroke after the second “c” made it a lazy “g”.
So, cancer became danger.
I drove off to find a place to bed down for the night.
- end -
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Martin Higgins
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