The Regulators - Stephen King [118]
'Yes, he is,' Garin says. 'It's like a bank of lights went on inside him. I don't know what did it and I don't know how long it's going to last, but . . . is there any way at all you could take us up to the mining operation, Mr Symes? I know you're not supposed to, and I bet your insurance company would have a fit if they found out, but it would mean so much to Seth. It would mean so much to all of us. We're on kind of a tight budget, but I could give you forty dollars for your time.'
'I wouldn't do it for four hundred,' I said. 'This kind of thing a man does for free or he doesn't do at all. Come on. We'll take one of the ATVs. Your older boy can drive it, if you don't have any objections. That's against company regs, too, but might as well be hung for a goat as a lamb, I guess.'
Anyone who's reading this and maybe judging me for a fool (a reckless fool, at that), I only wish you could have seen the way Bill Garin's face lit up. I'm sorry as hell for what happened to him and the others in California — which I only know about from his sister's letter — but believe me when I say that he was happy on that day, and I'm glad I had a chance to make him so.
We had ourselves quite an afternoon even before our 'little scare'. Garin did let his older boy, John, drive us out to the pit-wall, and was he excited? I almost think young Jack Garin would have voted me for God, if I'd been running for the job. They were a nice family, and devoted to the little boy. The whole tribe of them. I guess it was pretty amazing for him to just start up talking like he did, but how many people would change all their plans because of a thing like that, right on the spur of the moment, even so? These folks did, and without so much as a word of argument among them, so far as I could tell.
The tyke jabbered all the way out to the pit, a mile a minute. A lot was gibberish, but not all. He kept talking about the characters on Bonanza, and the Ponderosa, and outlaws, and the silver mines. Some cartoon show was on his mind, too. Motor Cops, I think it was. He showed me an action figure from the show, a lady with red hair and a blaster that he could take out of her holster and kind of stick in her hand. Also, he kept patting the ATV and calling it 'the Justice Wagon'. Then Jack'd kind of puff up behind the wheel (he must have been driving all of ten miles an hour) and say, 'Yeah, and I'm Colonel Henry. Warning, Force Corridor dead ahead!' And they'd all laugh. Me too, because by then I was as swept up in the excitement of it as the rest of them.
I was excited enough so that one of the things he was saying didn't really hit home until later on. He kept talking about 'the old mine'. If I thought anything about that, I guess I thought it was something out of some Bonanza show. It never crossed my mind to think he was talking about Rattlesnake Number One, because he couldn't know about it! Even the people in Desperation didn't know we'd uncovered it while blasting just the week before. Hell, that's why I had so much paperwork to 'rassle' with on a Sunday afternoon, writing a report to the home office about what we'd uncovered and listing different ideas on how to handle it.
When the idea that Seth Garin was talking about Rattlesnake Number One did occur to me, I remembered how he'd come running into the office trailer as if he'd been there a million times before. Right across to the photos on the bulletin board he went. That gave me a chill, but there was something else, something I saw after the Garin family had gone on its way to Carson, that gave me an even colder one. I'll get to it in a bit.
When we got to the foot of the embankment, I swapped seats with Jack and drove us up the equipment road, which is all nicely graveled and wider than some interstates. We crossed the top and went down the far side. They all oohed and aahed, and I guess it is a little more than just a hole in the ground. The pit is almost a thousand feet at its deepest, and cuts through layers of rock that go back all the way to the Paleozoic Era, three hundred and