Carter was studying weekend markets. "Everybody's broke, everybody buys used—that's the market," he said, like he'd just struck oil. So we started running swap meets. Every Saturday at five a.m., we loaded that old pickup with secondhand stereos, CB radios, surplus jackets, an old guitar, car parts, and cassette tapes we'd pulled from garage sales. Back then Americans were obsessed with two things: cheap and familiar. We were selling both. The eighties were closing in, but the fatigue of the seventies hadn't lifted yet. Gas prices had stabilized a little, but factories were still cutting shifts. People talked recovery, but when it came time to open their wallets, they got careful. We did too. Money came slow and left fast. Some weekends we'd count the cash after packing up and find it barely covered next week's gas and rent.
One time a girl in glasses flipped through the tapes and asked if we had that early Fleetwood Mac record. We'd sold it the day before. Carter put on his salesman grin immediately and told her that one was overrated anyway, that she should try this one instead, and he shoved a tape into the player and cranked the volume to the top, distorted guitar blasting out of the speaker.
That day Carter looked like a hippie who'd shown up ten years late, hair careless, smile too practiced, his voice sliding toward teasing the moment he saw a pretty girl. The student had her blouse buttoned to the collar, skirt below the knee, posture straight, like she'd just come from church. She looked at Carter once. The judgment was simple: he didn't look reliable.
She turned and walked away.
Carter watched her back and muttered that college kids always thought they'd invented taste. I told him to stop acting like a cultural advisor. He shrugged and said he was just providing a service. We didn't say much more. After she was gone, he added under his breath, "College kids think they invented taste."
"Can you not act like some music prophet?" I said.
"I'm a cultural service provider."
"You're broke."
"Temporarily underfunded."
The weather was good around noon. We stood behind the table in sunglasses like two guys pretending we had a plan. Then people down the way started packing up, and word came that a license check was moving through.
"Load up."
We shoved everything into the pickup in a hurry, the engine shaking like it might fall apart, cut through side streets, and finally parked at a bigger weekend market. It was louder there. Pocket watches, railroad lanterns, typewriters, miner's tools, war medals, surplus odds and ends, yellowed maps, used furniture—anything. If it was old enough, someone would stop and run a hand over it.
We parked along the back row, where everyone was selling mining lamps, gold pans, and quartz chunks threaded with gold. We sat on the tailgate eating hot dogs and canned beans while the wind blew a napkin across the dirt. Carter said he'd been trying to grow the business for years, but the market kept getting tighter, everybody talking recovery while fewer people actually spent money. He also said I could go get a stable job and didn't have to bleed weekends out here with him. I told him it wasn't that I couldn't find work, it was that I didn't want to sit still. When you stop moving, your head starts replaying old footage. Moving stays quieter. A boombox nearby was playing music, the sound quality terrible, and we didn't turn it down.
A man from the next booth walked over to say hello. "Daniel Crowe," he said, then smiled once, "People call me Deadeye." His left eye had no focus in the sun, like a polished glass bead. His right eye was sharp, and when it swept our table it didn't miss anything. When we shook hands I saw the left eye clearly—glass, pale gray, reflecting sunlight evenly and coldly; the right eye kept measuring distance, like it was weighing rock instead of looking at people. He smiled easy, but that living eye traveled our setup and lingered on Carter's chest a second longer than it lingered on the stereo.
His booth had quartz chunks and gold pans, a few raw stones with gold veins placed where the light stayed steady, the layout casual at a glance but obviously calculated.
Talking a little, we learned his grandfather and father had both worked illegal placer and hardrock jobs, targeting abandoned shafts and unregistered veins, following quartz bands deeper, hunting enrichment where things bent and broke. He said his father got arrested once for crossing a claim line, did time, came out missing a finger. He said it evenly, without emphasis, without shame.
"Real veins don't run straight," he said. "Straight is for tourists. The bend is where the money is." I picked up a piece of quartz from his table, turned it, and said the gold line wasn't ending, it was folding back, which meant the lower structure kept going, only the stress direction had shifted. Deadeye's good eye stayed on my face for a moment.
"Not many young guys read rock like that," he said.
I shrugged and said I'd learned from older folks in the family. No more than that.
He didn't press, but I could feel him recalibrating us. His judgment came from illegal digging and hard-earned instinct; mine came from pages and diagrams. He couldn't tell why I knew what I knew, only that I did.
Carter stood beside me without a word.
Deadeye crushed his cigarette out and said there was a place nearby where we could sit down and talk strata and gold runs. The hustler edge in his voice softened a little, like he'd found someone who spoke the same language. So we packed our booths.
The place was on an old stretch of Colfax, a classic bar and grill. When we pushed the door open, charred steak and beer hit the air, a football game played on the TV, somebody at the bar slapped the counter laughing, ice clinked sharp in glass. We took a booth against the wall. Deadeye ordered whiskey for me and poured himself a heavy one too. I could tell he was testing my tolerance, so I slid my glass aside and said I'd take it slow. After a few rounds the talk naturally went underground.
Deadeye lifted a hand and tapped his left eye. The prosthetic looked dark under the light, not like normal glass. He said it wasn't from a clinic, that he'd taken it from the eye socket of a miner who died in a cave-in. The guy used to brag that the stone in that eye was a family piece and that it could see gold threads inside rock. When the collapse happened everybody ran, but Deadeye remembered the eye. That night he went back to the abandoned shaft, dug it out, and later worked it into his own socket. He told it like he was explaining the history of an old tool.
I almost set my drink down.
Hearing that while eating made my stomach twist. Before he could keep going, I steered the conversation back to veins.
He said his grandfather and father never relied on luck, they relied on judgment. They didn't fully trust equipment; they watched terrain breaks, water direction, shifts in rock color. People who'd done it long enough could stand on a slope for a minute and tell if a vein was cut, if the ground was hollow underneath, which patch of earth sounded dull underfoot and which patch threw back an empty echo. Early Western hands swore by that.
I said the real skill wasn't in a probe rod or a blast, it was in understanding terrain—slope angle, plant anomalies, river bends—if you watched long enough you could tell whether there was a passage below, even guess the direction a vein folded, because rich ground never ran straight, it hid in the turn. Deadeye listened closely.
He said his father got picked up once by federal agents for crossing a line, and after that he never went down again, lived on flipping ore samples and old tools. The family craft died out with his generation; he had asthma and couldn't stay underground long. He said there weren't many men who understood both structure and engineering the way I did. I shook my head and told him knowing what's down there doesn't mean you should take it, understanding is one thing and putting hands on it is another.
Deadeye nodded and didn't argue.
We sat there until close to midnight. When we got up to leave, Deadeye reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and handed us two black arrowheads. They were a little over an inch long, lines clean, edges sharp without any gritty stone feel, the surface smooth in a way that was almost wrong, and under the light it neither flashed nor shone, neither metal nor flint; he said it was called Thunderstone, a lightning-struck arrowhead used in ceremonies by certain tribes out West, the story being that lightning left behind a stone bone when it hit ground, warriors wore it before they went out for protection, and later miners picked up the habit too, touching it before a shift like saying hello to whatever lived under the earth, and he couldn't say what it was made of, only that it didn't belong to ordinary seams, that not many people had ever seen one, fewer still understood it, but the ones who carried it usually wouldn't be the first name people remembered.
I held it a long time. It didn't resemble any ore sample I'd ever seen.