Part 3
Gregor found his friend unendingly interesting and attached himself to Dimitri like a barnacle attaches itself to a ship, and in this case a ship that was adrift in a sea of melancholy, depression and dysfunction. Like Lennie and George (Of Mice and Men), Gregor and Dimitri completed each other to make nearly a whole human. They were a pair of co-dependent alcoholics in a strange land, bound to each other and a mutual fate, whatever that was.
Gregor was a poor front man, but Dimitri wasn’t even a candidate, in spite of his brilliance, it lay hidden in a slurred, Cyrillic vocabulary, which was actually a front of it’s own, that Dimitri hid behind to let Gregor take the responsibility for nearly all their social interaction.
When Dave had picked up the two in Delta the first time Gregor had done all the talking while Dimitri read, or smoked, or gazed at the desolate alkali flats of the tiny western town. A non-verbal acrimony and distrust was born from the onset there at the bus station and never abated throughout the relationship between Dave and Dimitri. It festered and boiled over whenever Dimitri transgressed the demarcation zone Dave had established and throughout the summer Dave’s warnings to Dimitri through Gregor had visibly increased in both volume and menace. Dimitri was nonplussed, but acknowledged that Dave was dangerous so he employed discretion and stealth at his own risk.
When Dave announced he’d be gone most of the morning and that lunch had already been prepared and bagged, he looked directly at Dimitri and pointed to his hands to signal to all that he was to keep them off the counter and out of the galley.
Dave left shortly after his ominous warning and carrying an ax, a large knife, a wicker basket with a folding top, and wearing a red stocking cap, he looked like little red riding hood and the wolf combined. The crew finished breakfast in his wake and Jesse had offered to clean up while the rest began their day. Gregor followed the DiCamillos down to the shaft area where all began to do their respective jobs. Dimitri offered to help Jesse clean up, which was unusual, but Jesse accepted the offer and the two busily did dishes and bused the dining table.
Early in the afternoon Dave had returned with enough fruit to make a number of pies which he immediately began to prepare. He pulled butter out of the ice box and flour off the shelf, cleaned the surface of the prep tables and started to make dough for the pie crusts. He cleaned and separated black from red berries, sugared and salted the bowls where they stewed and otherwise preoccupied himself while unconsciously humming. His trance was broken by one of the DiCamillos who walked into the kitchen to ask for the lunch sandwiches which Dave had mentioned before leaving in the morning. Dave replied by saying they had been bagged and left on the counters at the front on the main table. The big Italian-American turned and went into the other room and came back to say there was nothing there. Dave stopped, miffed at the interruption and with flour randomly dispersed across his upper torso, chin, and hands went into the other room to discover the same thing. He rubbed his chin, leaving a giant white hand print across his face to make him look like a Comanche warrior- with an apron. As he turned red with anger immediately concluding that Dimitri had stolen all the lunches for himself, he walked over to the kitchen door and grabbed one of the butchering knives hanging on the wall and walked out.
The Road Less Traveled
100 yards down the path toward the shaft the 3 geologists were talking in a circle as Dave quickly walked up to them and without explanation, pointed at Dimitri with his knife and asked where the lunches were, shaking, and with a lip that kept getting caught on one of his canine teeth as if his entire endocrine system had shut down and stopped producing saliva. But he was clearly spitting mad and only able to control himself from a violent maneuver because Jesse blurted out that he had taken all the sandwiches down to the adit entry where he’d left them, absent mindedly, to go and meet with the two Russians. Jesse asked Gregor to ask Dimitri to quickly go and retrieve the cooler full of sandwiches and bring it back to them immediately. In the meantime, Jesse and Gregor both tried to calm Dave down as he eyed Dimitri slinking away and then to return moments later with the cooler. Jesse and Gregor were only partially able to control Dave from exacting revenge on the innocent Dimitri and kept themselves ready to either defend or perhaps, get out of Dave’s way if he advanced with the knife. Everyone was on edge.
A number of tense moments passed as all four of them stood by while Dave regained some measure of control and without a word, he turned and walked back to the kitchen, passing the lunch-seeking DiCamillo without a word, his knife pointing at the ground.
“Jesus Horatio Christ”, Jesse murmured and picked up the cooler and walked the other three toward the adit. DiCamillo took the rest of the sandwiches into the hole while the geologists ate lunch in silence and only later in the afternoon did things return to normal as the men got back to their routine.
Something’s Cooking and It Ain’t Right
Dave had returned as well, to whatever his normal was and while no longer humming, had found his pie-making groove and was deeply engaged in preparing the pastries he had promised would be the best any of them had ever had. Dave’s background was a little sketchy to Jesse, who had cautiously asked Dave earlier in the summer what he had done to get himself thrown into the Buena Vista facility where he had learned his cooking-craft. Dave demurred, other than to say it wasn’t a gun that got him there, only adding to the mystery of what he’d done.
That night, dinner was quiet and Dimitri didn’t attend, choosing instead to take a book and read out by the lake and watch the sun set over the West Elk range, swallowing the Star Mine in gulps of mountain sized shadows. He also towed a bottle under his arm to keep himself company and left the others to eat and work as evening set in. Dimitri was quickly forgotten and left alone, safely out of Dave’s mind as well, and both men were free to pursue their own passions.
Toward the end of dinner, Dave finally announced to the table that the pies he’d been preparing would be ready after they had been allowed to cool. Forgetting about Dimitri Dave placed the pies on an open sill at the back of the kitchen off the porch area allowing the evening air to do its job. Dave commenced to clean up the table as the men talked about the next day’s work with an air of excitement and anticipation, and a bottle of whiskey passed around the horn, the group took on volume with each round and an animation that drew Dave in and so all of the men, except Dimitri, grew louder, rapidly sliding into inebriation. Dave suddenly stood up about an hour later and blurted out, “my pies”! and moved toward the kitchen and out to the window sill.
Dusk and fading light couldn’t hide the bleary Russian’s pie stained face as he lay drunk under the first stars of the night. Three empty pie shells and remnant crusts incriminated him beyond doubt to which he added his burps into the darkening sky, as if he’d eaten all three at the same time, in no time. His distended stomach offered his purplish fingers a warm drum to trill against in his near coma-like tranquility, just before all hell was about to be loosely broken.
Dave, wielding his kitchen ax in a frozen throwing arm position, prowled about the broken ground. The fading light made his progress slower than his vengence and violent resolution could bear so he beat the flat side of his weapon on the palm of his hand as he stalked maliciously in search of Dimitri, who was still hidden by the tree he lay under. Only his stomach and dancing fingers moved, which as soon as Dave saw, became the object of his obsession and he broke into a full throated, enraged, sprint. The noise stirred the others from the table and the party ran outside to see what was happening. Jesse was the first to realize the impending action and signaled to everyone to head toward the shaft where he could barely see Dimitri laying on the ground while Dave was running uphill from the lake where Dimitri had left his book and bottle, like a hound on the trail of his prey. Dave was running full tilt at Dimitri, screaming obscenities, which made Dimitri bolt upright to see Dave, with ax held high, trip immediately in front of him losing the ax during his fall and catching Dimitri with it on his shin. The bone shattered and Dimitri screamed in pain as he pulled it out of his leg with incredible alacrity, and in nearly the same motion brought the ax down on Dave’s head, cleaving it in half. Jesse stopped dead in this tracks at the scene with the others following as Gregor hurtled passed him to grab his friend who instinctively turned, and in the darkening light, swung wildly at the figure reaching toward him. Dimitri caught Gregor between the neck and shoulder with the bloody ax. Staggering backwards and with his wounded leg collapsing Dimitri tumbled head over heels….. into the open shaft. One crash, followed by another more muffled crash and finally a third and then a black silence.
The heavily bodied DiCamillos pounded their way to the edge of the hole and stared into the darkness. Jesse had never seen a dead body before and in his shock he saw Dave’s brain and lifeless body on the ground. He stared for a long time, he thought, into the abyss of what were Dave’s eyes and in a trance asked one of the brother’s to help him lift the body. Without any discussion, without a word, all of them threw the body into the shaft. Gregor’s eyes had rolled back into his head, he looked for all the world to be dead and without another thought or word between them they gathered him up as well and swung him toward the hole but as they let his body go he murmured “wait”. As before, three loud crashes and then nothing.
Coda
Jesse woke up the next morning, dazed and confused. The DiCamillos had left sometime during the night. He was covered in blood, he thought it was his own for a moment, and then remembered. He changed his clothes, walked outside to the shaft and saw the brothers had timbered the hole shut, somehow working in the dark, but he realized that’s how they always worked. It was second nature to them. Jesse would have to deal with the light of day by himself.
Mechanically, he cleaned and packed taking the entire day to do so. The mine would never be opened again, he decided, and would write a final report saying the mineralization had been all mined out and that the Star mine was just another myth perpetrated by the ignorant, the hopeful, the gold seeking dreamers, and he would bury the real story about what had happened so the Star would never again be looked at in the same way. As far as he was concerned the mine was history and that’s where it should stay.
He would tell the investors that once the crew had broken through the targeted stope and found nothing, that they’d decided to break camp. He would tell them the Russians were last headed to Delta and that Dave had volunteered to drop them off. Dave’s probation officer was in contact a few months later and he told the same thing, which was the last time he’d seen Dave, he was headed to the bus station, looking for a couple of tickets to New York. Jesse remembered that he hadn’t gotten any answers about what Dave had done in the first place to end up in prison. “He’s an ax murderer”, said his PO. “Sure”, said Jesse. “That’s a joke, right?”.
Jesse got out of the mining and exploration business a few years later and never saw the DiCamillos again, except for a moment in an Italian restaurant in Louisville, Colorado where the brothers were eating pasta until one of them caught sight of him. He nodded to the others and they turned to quietly acknowledge Jesse, who turned and walked out without a word. Maybe it wasn’t true, maybe it didn’t happen, maybe he had just made it all up, but he couldn’t talk himself into it, he simply couldn’t forget where they had all buried the hatchet.
