New Short Story

                                                      Bling Bling Eternal 

‘Awww dayyyyyumm! Yeah motherfucker!’ boomed Jerome, and his voice echoed out across the valley, bouncing off walls and resonating with that not-quite-hoodrat twang that said either homeboy or good old boy. The truth was Jerome was neither, and the valley was not his fallow industrial village between the I-70 on-ramp and Denver proper, but a real valley with trees and squirrels and one of the nicest crystals he’d ever laid his hands on resting triumphantly in his left hand. He held the crystal up to the light, and it lit with a pale blue fire under sharp geometric facets that could mean only one thing- Topaz. Of course, Jerome already knew that. He’d been working this spot every weekend practically- weekdays too sometimes, if his folks weren’t home and he knew no one at East High gave a damn enough to try and track them down. The topaz crystal in question had come from a hole- a mariolitic pocket, rather, Jerome would be quick to add, nestled under a boulder on the slopes of Pilot Peak, a craggy knob of billion-year-old Pikes Peak granite that lay largely forgotten in the gray hills southwest of Denver. He didn’t know the exact weight, of course, but he lifted his left hand thoughtfully and gauged the crystal to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 400 carats. ‘A Killer’, as Ron might say. Man, wait until Ron see’s this sucker, thought Jerome glowingly. Ron was Jerome’s ‘mentor’, you might say, but not in the creepy or sexual way the word seemed to have taken on meaning in recent years. Ron was a dinosaur, he’d be the first to admit- one of the last real ‘old timers’ in the North Denver Lapidary & Mineral Club, a stoic, scruffy holdout in a 1920’s bungalow off Washington Street which, well, he might have damn well bought in the 1920’s. He knew everywhere to dig, and more importantly, everywhere not to dig. It was Ron who has first told him about the Tarryalls, him who had brought a stubby sky blue crystal out of a hidden pocket in his ancient soup-stained trousers and held it up to the ruddy ghetto sunlight for Jerome to snatch out of his hand and admire with booming ‘WOWWWWW’s. ‘Watch it, kid, that’s the best one I got outta that pocket; big deal in 74’ Ron warned, but his smile betrayed him. He knew Jerome would never steal- in a way he was a dinosaur just like Ron: he knew how to be good and kind and indebted to nature’s endless awesomeness without anyone ever teaching him, without a field trip to the School of Mines Geology museum (though that helped), without nerdy yuppie parents who sent him to the Denver Academy and fed him kale and spinach with dinner.

Nope, he was just another ‘Nigga from the hood’, Dayshawn had to remind him all the time, his jeans sagging around his skinny ass and some dumb block ho wrapped around his arm like a child holds a stuffed animal. Jerome hated his skinny ass, hated the way his mindlessly conformist ‘cool’ was so easy and effective at the same time, hated the cute girls always a step behind him. ‘Well you know what Dayshawn, Dis nigga gone found some ROCKS!’, Jerome said to the empty valley and granite boulders, and laughed till be had to sit down on the ground next to his hole, wheezing and reaching for the Gatorade bottle and carrying on talking to himself. ‘And not dat kind y’all prolly be smoking either….bitch!’, he added in his best hood accent. Jerome coughed up the Gatorade and reached for his inhaler, taking a quick puff and looking up directly at the sky right after, just like Doctor Algers had told him too. ‘Man, another ten pounds and I’ll be KILLIN it out here’, Jerome thought to himself, but he knew it was really more like 30. He was a fatass, as Dayshawn, mom, pops, and Janelle never seemed to tire of reminding him. He could dig though, and hike too (in short spurts), and damnit if he hadn’t dug a hell of a hole on some good intuition to hit this pocket.

He looked around instinctively, as Ron always told stories about all those ‘damn claim jumpers, pocket raiders, and crystal thieves’ (including several men Ron wouldn’t name but Jerome had a feeling were now prominent collectors in Denver) that would show up at a time like this. Of course, nobody was around. Just the sound of a distant badly-tuned jeep rumbling up highway 67, and the caw of a lone red-tailed hawk circling high in the turquoise sky above. He imagined a group of collectors though- they could be anything from a gaggle of grad students from the School of Mines, or a bunch of nerdy engineers and doctors out for a little Sunday adventure, or the even-present (and always white) ‘Ya’ll know yer trespassing?’ redneck locals. He imagined them stumbling on him- Third generation Nigerian, 6’1”, 215 lbs, round soft face, big black glasses (but not the cool kind, Dayshawn would be quick to point out), and a ‘fro that looked somewhere in-between Richard Prior and Einstein in his later years. Fierce eyes- his mother always said that; about the most sophisticated thing she’d ever said, it seemed, but it was true- they were an indeterminate shade of hazel; smart, ruthless, angry at the physical confines they’d been fated, ready to find something incredible.

 He figured the handcuffs and trespassing charges would come way before the patient, reasonable explanation of ‘permitted recreational activities on BLM land’ or the explanation of how the ‘ Paragenetic Sequence of Aluminosilicate Minerals in Mariolitic Pockets of the Pikes Peak Batholith’ really was going to be his high school thesis topic. He stuck his chin out a bit, the soft flesh jiggling outward in defiant comedy, at the though of ‘high school thesis topics’, and how flat and vaguely condescending Mr. Johnson’s expression had been when Jerome had gushingly told him his idea. ‘Have you thought of talking to Melinda about the solar cars, or maybe the work they do with students over at St. Anthony’s?’, he’d suggested back. Well, to be honest, Jerome didn’t give a shit about that pseudo-intellectual pretty girl Melinda’s solar car project, or the fact that she’d already gotten in early-decision to Duke, or that some doctors at St. Anthony’s would let him dab at a mysterious petri dish under a hood in the hopes that some famous white guy would eventually get some credit for helping cure people of cancer or something. He just didn’t care.  That was the great thing about rocks, Jerome thought, admiring the miniature chandeliers and mirrored walls that seemed to emanate out of the topaz crystal- they didn’t get cancer, they didn’t have unfair advantages on college admissions, they didn’t have junky parents- they had only beauty, only that sparkling effervescence that made one feel as if one could live forever. He’d brought his research idea to Dr. Haywood at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science as well- he remembered driving over there that freezing cold day last March, the roads all slick and recrystallized under the tires of Dawshawn’s ancient Buick he practically had to steal the key for to borrow for 20 minutes. He remembered Dr. Haywood’s implacable smile when he told him that ‘he was sure Jerome would go great places and was honored that he wanted to volunteer and perhaps have access to study some of their research collection, but they already had 20 geoscience volunteers and unfortunately now wasn’t a good time.’  Never mind that the average volunteer age was about 70, never mind that people of color were grossly underrepresented in earth sciences, never mind that he was probably the first student ever to come to Haywood with a question besides ‘my teacher want me to indentify this rock…’ He kicked the frozen ground hard with his sneakers on the way out the back door of the museum, and turned over a fist-size chunk of shiny purple-grey covellite, a rare copper mineral. Surely a mistake, or something fallen off the cart on the way into the collections room. He pocketed it with a smirk, knowing it would bring at least fifty bucks on Ebay. ‘If you can’t join em’, fuck em’, his dad would say when he was high sometimes, which didn’t really make much sense, but felt good to say in his head that afternoon. He wasn’t about to become some welfare nigga- he was just grateful he didn’t have to hustle the other kind of rocks.

   The last of the beef jerky and sour patch kids washed down with the end of the ‘Xtra Gulp’ size Gatorade (note to self, bring healthier lunch next time Jerome thought), Jerome returned down into the hole, which now spanned almost a body-length across and just as deep. The boulder under which the pocket had lain now sat perched precariously over the hole, half of its thousand or so pound mass looming over his head. He thought he saw it shift slightly as he climbed down and imagined it rolling onto him with an anticlimactic thud and him being crushed forever on the gray slopes of Pilot Peak; the months or years it would take to find his body. ‘Fuck it’, he thought, and took the strong end of the crowbar and used it to lever the boulder back a few inches onto more stable ground. He thought of the young hustlers gunned down on the concrete blocks of his neighborhood, the high school dealers in shiny new Navigator’s and Mustang’s dead from some DUI, the junkies that never actually died but just seemed to pass into a pale drawn-out nothingness that was worse than death itself. There were so many worse ways to die than succumbing to the gentle pressure of the earth, entombed in a crystalline cavern the universe had set aside a billion-odd years ago. He wasn’t going to die though, he reminded himself, but Ron might when he got a look at this crystal wrapped up in old newspapers in his rucksack.  He reached up towards the sunlight and grabbed the small duffel bag with the ‘pocket tools’: screwdriver (‘Flathead, never Phillips’, Ron had warned him), brushes, chisels, chrome-moly steel Estwing pick. Digging carefully into the soft clay of the pocket floor, he felt something sharp, and then feeling a little more, a smooth, glassy face amidst the wet clay and ‘kitty litter’ granite rubble. Pulling gently, he lifted another smaller crystal out of the hole and into the building sunset. Dirtier, for sure, with some tenacious-looking iron coating the termination, but still probably 200 carats and a ‘cutter’ through and through under the dirt. A cutter not in the sense that Jerome’s left pinky now dripped sticky red blood at odd intervals from the spiky quartz shards that littered the bottom of the hole, but in the sense that Ron’s garage-turned-lapidary workshop could pull a good-sized gemstone out of its stony heart. ‘If I ever let him get near it with the saw’, Jerome thought, wrapping this one carefully in the full page spread for ‘Buy one get one free Chicken Wings!’ of the ‘Downing Supermart Saver-News’ they were always pushing at people in the hood.  ‘Imma be buyin’ more than chicken wings with this’ thought Jerome smugly, doing some quick mental math at a ballpark 90 cents/carat and finding the numbers quite satisfactory.

Just then, he heard a rustling in the bushes downhill and the unmistakable sound of cowboy boots scraping across lichen-y granite. George Dunhill. ‘Ohhhhhh shit’ though Jerome. A pinprick of sweat broke out just below where the fro’s edges met his forehead and worked its way down his ear and under his armpits, and a strange ringing seemed to fill his ears. ‘Ohhh fuck.’ George Dunhill, or more properly, George Carter Dunhill III, was the owner of the claim just down the hill, and as far as he was concerned, he owned every square inch of Pilot Peak- public land boundaries be damned. The mean-looking dog and meaner-looking 9 mm. he kept near him at all times helped reinforce that this was still the West and white men made tough by god and a handgun made the rules. The truth was this was not Dunhill’ claim; it was United States National Forest and the only people he could get in trouble with for digging a hole here was the federal government. Didn’t matter now though. The boots click-clack-clicked overhead with a slightly arythymic sound- Jerome remembered he had a bit of a limp- and eventually faded off over the edge of the mountain.  The sound of a dog howling somewhere in the distance made more needles of sweat spread around his brow, but by now Jerome was pretty sure that Dunhill was just passing through en-route to his claim. Still though, if he saw him… well, he didn’t want to think about what might happen. 

The sun was in its terminal decline now, fading lazily over the edges of the giant Taryall valley to the west, the sagebrush and distant fences saluting his discovery in silent golden applause.  He reached down and pulled out one last crystal for the day- perhaps the last of the pocket, but he hoped not. It was small- perhaps a half-inch high but with brilliant cerulean color and a complex termination that looked like the angles in one of those early Nintendo game worlds. It certainly didn’t seem of this earth, and Jerome knew as soon as he picked it up it would be a gift to Therese. Oh, Therese, Jerome thought with sudden self-consciousness, despite the thought being strictly in his mind and the absence of anyone else for miles, not counting a crazy redneck vigilante and his dog. She was ‘so dang fly’, as Dayshawn might have said, but only cuz calling a girl fly was now old-school and Dayshawn was too preoccupied with what everyone else thought of him to come up with his own style. Lustrous, that’s what Jerome thought of when he thought of Therese; the word that described the brightly mirrored reflection off a really good crystal’s surface, but also had something of the ‘lust’ it contained. She shone in this strange half-ghetto-booty-half-ethnically-ambiguous-smart-girl-you-see-on-college-admissions-pamphlets kind of luster, one that made Jerome scared and obsessed at the same time. She was so ‘out of his league’, but she seemed neither inspired nor offended by his company, just happy to share a few neutral words about the next science Olympiad meeting or college admissions news. He hoped her words would be a little more than neutral when he handed her the crystal in class next Monday. He wondered if she’d know what it was, if she’d measure it’s distinctive heft and steely blue luster in her hand knowingly and smile a knowing smile his direction, one that would be so much better than the weak smiles Dayshawn’s girlfriends gave him when he tried to impress them with a little knowledge of the particulars of the bling they always wanted more of. ‘Why she always lyin’ though, tellin’ me they diamonds, when they really rhinestones’ he whistled to himself, quoting Kanye as he packed up the rucksack and started to made his way downhill towards the rusting Buick at the end of Forest Road 273.