The Regulators - Stephen King [126]
Garin kind of laughed and shook his head and said, 'Two hours on the road and I won't even be able to believe this happened.'
I told him maybe that was just as well.
'But one thing I won't forget,' he said, 'is that Seth talked today. Not just words or phrases only his family could understand, either. He actually talked. You don't know how amazing that is, but we do.' He waved at his family, who had got back into the ATV by then. 'And if he can do it once, he can do it again.' And maybe he has, I hope so. I'd like to know, too. I'm curious about that boy, and in more ways than one. When I gave him his little action figure woman, he smiled at me and kissed my cheek. A sweet kiss, too, though I seemed to catch a little whiff on the mine of his skin . . . like ashes and meat and cold coffee.
We 'bid a fond adieu' to the China Pit and I drove them back to the office trailer where their car was. So far as I could see, no one took much notice of us, even though I drove right down Main Street. Desperation on a Sunday afternoon in the hot weather is like a ghost-town.
I remember standing there at the bottom of the trailer steps, waving as they drove off toward the awful thing Garin's sister said was waiting for them at the end of their trip — a senseless drive-by shooting. All of them waved back . . . except for Seth, that is. Whatever was in that mine, I think we were fortunate to get out . . . and for him to then be the only survivor of that shooting in San Jose! It's almost as if he's got what they call 'a charmed life', isn't it?
As I said, I dreamed about it in Peru — mostly the skull-dream, and of shining my light into that crack — but I didn't think of it much until I read Audrey Wyler's letter, the one that was tacked on the bulletin board when I came back from Peru. Sally lost the envelope, but said it just came addressed to 'The Mining Company of Desperation'. Reading it reinforced my belief that something happened out there when Seth was underbill (as we say in the business), something it might be wrong to lie about, but I did lie. How could I not, when I didn't even know what that something was?
Still, that grin.
That grin.
He was a nice little boy, and I am so glad he wasn't killed in the Rattlesnake (and he could have been; we all could have been) or with the rest of them in San Jose, but . . .
The grin didn't seem to belong to the boy at all. I wish I could say better, but that's as close as I can come.
I want to set down one more thing. You may remember me saying that Seth talked about 'the old mine', but that I didn't connect that with the Rattlesnake shaft because hardly anyone in town knew about it, let alone through-travelers from Ohio. Well, I started thinking about what he'd said again while I was standing there, watching the dust from their car settle. That, and how he ran across the office trailer, right to the pictures of the China Pit on the bulletin board, like he'd been there a thousand times before. Like he knew. I had an idea then, and that cold feeling came with it. I went back inside to look at the pictures, knowing it was the only way I could lay that feeling to rest.
There were six in all, aerial photos the company had commissioned in the spring. I got the little magnifier off my key-chain and ran it over them, one after another. My gut was rolling, telling me what I was going to see even before I saw it. The aerials were taken long before the blast-pattern that uncovered the Rattlesnake shaft, so there was no sign of it in them. Except there was. Remember me writing that he tapped his way around the pictures, saying: 'Here it is, here's what I want to see, here's the mine'? We thought he was talking about the pit-mine, because that's what the pictures were of. But with my magnifying loupe I could see the prints his fingers had left on the shiny surface of the photos. Every one was on the south face, where we uncovered the shaft. That was what he was telling us he wanted to see, not the pit-mine but the shaft-mine