By Arthur Davis
Lauren Bennett Channing was panning for gold at the mouth of the Chilton River Delta in southern Arizona near the Tennessee border. The twenty-four-year-old ex-part time nurse from a wealthy Boston family had been panning for ten minutes when she noticed a massive structure in the distance.
At first, she hesitated. It was just 10 a.m. and she hadn’t had breakfast or coffee because she had run out of both yesterday, her second day panning. Trying to remain inconspicuous, she had rented a small trailer with minimal amenities and was woefully unprepared for the undertaking.
She scrubbed the dirt from her cheeks and squinted. It was the Chilton River nuclear power plant, abandoned last year, already collapsing from neglect.
To the south was a herd of rare spotted bison. Maybe two hundred of them grazing off citrus ferns that were abundant in this part of the northwest. She knelt down, resuming her panning in the hope she would find the gold described in a map she had bought online from Craigslist. The map was perfectly aged, smudged, torn, topologically detailed, and had cost her $2.37, which she had borrowed from her grandmother’s Hermès Birkin prototype purse owned by Jane Birkin, which sold for $10 million in 1995.
*
“Are you stealing money again, child?” his grandmother’s bodyguard asked weeks earlier, disappointed with the young girl’s behavior.
“No. Certainly not. I’m taking a course online on how to evaluate antique women’s purses from the late Victorian age.”
Her grandmother walked into her bedroom, noticed her bodyguard’s drawn 9mm Heckler & Koch, considered the excuse, and turned back to her study where reruns of cage fighting were running on her black and white television. She adored Lauren and was sympathetic to the young woman’s strange, though thankfully not self-destructive, idiosyncrasies.
Lauren had been a nurse for a few months some time ago, an excellent one worthy of promotion, but after a few intensive weeks recognized that she was not a warm, sociable caring soul. The idea of helping sick, smelly, socially incompatible dying strangers really wasn’t something she wanted to spend her life doing.
Rendering aid to strangers was an alien concept to her, as well as to her generation.
*
The wind started to roll down the small valley, and it was not quite noon. She had been warned about the unpredictably deadly gusts that could thunder down the valley floor, reaching speeds approaching sixty miles an hour. There were scattered signs along the narrow gorge that posted these kinds of warnings. In a fit of youthful arrogance she decided they were wrong, purposely misinforming the public just to scare people away from panning this part of the river.
She swirled another panful of water and soil in the dollar pan she had bought at the Chilton General Store a few feet away from where she was panning. The eight-story store was massive, with a hotel and two restaurants which had a month-long waiting list.
*
Lauren wealth was deeply imbedded in several impossibly complex trusts. Really obscenely wealthy as the only grandchild of Natalie Brownsten who started Known Industries, which specialized in telling people the truth online about things, people, history, events, and a broad spectrum of social, economic, and political and scientific realities.
She knew about the tall, posted warning signs and the two-dollar fee for panning in a restricted animal crossing zone. There were “No Panning” zones covering deer, frogs, chipmunks, moose, zebra and alien crossings. She shrugged them off. Another inconvenience she hadn’t the patience to consider.
She ignored the advice of the other campers in the trailer park that the Forest Rangers were dedicated to protecting the greater part of the valley and known to shoot panners who couldn’t present the $2 crossing fee certificate.
*
Lauren worked another few panfuls with renewed energy and focus. She enjoyed the rhythm of the process, the excitement and possibility of striking it rich making her independently wealthy when she looked up and noticed two sheep. Just not any sheep, and a tall, dark stranger standing nearby. He was over six feet, with broad shoulders, week-old stubble and deep iridescent eyes that took her in an instant. The Forest Ranger was holding two green sheep on a heavy leather leash.
“Ma’am,” he began, slinging his rifle off his shoulder, “do you have a license to pan this close to a collapsed nuclear facility and multiple crossings?”
He was distractingly handsome, with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing thick, powerful forearms that sent chills down her back. She knew she had been caught. Green sheep were irradiated creatures from the neglected power plant. Somehow the sheep were immune from the cellular destruction of radiation and genetically turned from pale white to pink and finally, to mint green.
“You read the warning signs?”
Lauren struggled for a response as her heart nearly thumped out of her chest.
The ranger, now clearly annoyed, pointed his rifle toward the flashing six-by-six-foot sign that warned “Alien Crossing.”
Lauren saw the red flashing sign before she began to pan. She noticed it yesterday too. Born and raised in New York City, she couldn’t recall ever seeing such a warning on Fifth, Madison, or Park Avenue. She knew there were other avenues, further east in Manhattan, but those were in the gang-controlled, rat-infested, police corrupted slum-scattered part of the city where her parents forbade her to go.
Stunning as he was, she could feel the panic overtaking her body.
There was no place to run or hide as the Ranger slowly advanced on her, so she stood with cunning arrogance, dropped her tool-laden vest and unbuttoned her sweat-soaked shirt, revealing a set of breasts that immediately immobilized the ranger. She stood, hands on her hips exposed for about ten seconds before he genuflected and apologized for bothering her. He pivoted away while the two green sheep remained paralyzed with what they were watching then, reluctantly, turned away emotionally disheartened and spiritually broken.
The wind was picking up. Lauren stood. She was hungry, thirsty, and disappointed. “This shit is going to take forever,” she quietly admitted to herself while removing her custom gloves, carefully examining her day-old, manicured nails.
“Fifty dollars with an obscene tip, and my polished nails are already cracking.”
She turned her hands over, palm up. Soft. Resilient. Remembering when she had last been with a man. The thrill of being touched and touching in a crazed evening with her therapist, Dr. Mason Longstreet, before her new career of gold panning began.
Relieved the Ranger backed off, she soaked the sweat from her brow with a hand-painted Japanese silk handkerchief she had purchased as a birthday present to herself last year.
The day after, she returned to the same expensive Madison Avenue boutique on Fifty-Seventh Street where she stood at the same counter as the same manager wrapped the fifteen-hundred-dollar gloves in several layers of expensive gift wrap buried in two boxes.
“The gloves, can I use them for gold panning?”
“The Gleeson & Downey hand stitched gloves? Yes. Of course,” Sylvia Hutchenson, said unable to hide her annoyance, showing Lauren the pink tag attached to the gloves that clearly noted they could be utilized for rock climbing, mining, gold panning, calligraphy, most minor surgical procedures, and every kind of sexual activity.
“Excellent,” Lauren said, thanked the clearly annoyed manager, and slipped out of the store and into the back of a waiting stretch Mercedes-Maybach.
Oliver, her driver turned, “Ms. Lauren, where to?”
“The Chilton River Delta, of course,” she said, bothered because she had already informed her friends and family that she was taking a few years off to pan for gold.
Lauren sat back, relaxed into the butter-soft leather seat, fingered two perfectly aged Chips Ahoy Chocolate chip cookies from a nearly empty box, sipped at a goblet of chilled 2020 Château Lafite Rothschild, and knew it was time to change her name to Isabella Lowenstein, III.
* * *
Arthur Davis is a retired Wall Street trained management consultant. He has been quoted in The New York Times and in Crain’s New York Business, taught at The New School and interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. He has advised The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, Senator John McCain’s investigating committee on boxing reform, and testified as an expert witness before the New York State Commission on Corruption in Boxing. His work has been published in numerous journals as original and reprint fiction. He was featured in a single author collection, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 2018 Write Well Award for excellence in short fiction and, twice nominated, received Honorable Mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. More at www.talesofourtime.com, Amazon Author Central and the Poets & Writers Organization.