Chapter IX

It tugged at my insides to hear that life had not been all that kind to her, but her story was the same as thousands of others. Seems like half of the kids nowadays are being raised by single parents.
I am not really in any position to pass judgement on them, since I lack the commitment to get as far as the married-with-kids part. It’s not that I don’t want the house in the suburbs with the Japanese Maple in the front yard, just that that intentional long term commitment scares me half to death.
We talked about our families, and the folks back home and what was going on it town. Just general conversation. It is good to talk to someone who you don’t have to maintain a façade with. We had seen the best and worst of each other. There was no need to pretend we were anything other than we were. It was a nice comfortable way to spend an evening. I don’t think either one of us had intentions of it going any farther that it did, which was just a couple of drinks and dinner.
Towards the end of the evening she asked “You ever do anything with the Rainbow Room?”
There were only two people in the world, as far as I know that knew about the Rainbow Room, and that was Star and me.
My family had kept the cabin and claim up in the hills all these years. Probably because it wasn’t worth much, partly for sentimental reasons, since it was in a lot of ways the Genesis of our family. We used it partly as a hunting cabin, partly as a place to get away from everything when the pressures of life got to be too much.
When I was growing up, I would disappear up to the claim. Usually I would spend some time hacking away at the back of the tunnel in the hopes that I would stumble upon the continuation of the gold. It was a good way to gather my thoughts. When I was up there at the claim picking away at the tunnel face, it was a kind of mindless physical state that allowed your mind to float free, and there was no telling where your thoughts might lead. Some of my clearest thinking has come when half of me was engaged in some physical activity and the other half was gnawing away at some problem.
For some time I had been following a vein of quartz into the mountain. It showed no evidence of gold, but once in a while would hit a pocket of Quartz crystals, which I would carefully extract and sell to the local rock shop for a few bucks. Some of then were pretty good and I could get $20 or more for them. Once I had run across a vug of sceptered crystals that brought me $80. In terms of wages it paid a lot less than bagging groceries, but I wouldn’t have traded it, because the “office” was so much nicer, and I didn’t have to put up with the people.
I was working on the face when my pick broke through into a larger room. I could tell it was fairly large because the sound of the pick echoed a little as I worked the opening wider. When I got it big enough, I stuck a flashlight through the opening, and could just make out a “room” about ten feet long maybe six feet tall. The entire inner surface sparkled with quartz crystals. The sight was spectacular.
I spent the next couple of days making a opening to the rooms that was easy to get in and out of.. When I first could get enough of me inside to take a good look at it, I saw that there was a streak of color around the middle of the room. It was amethyst, and the crystals were sceptered!
Sceptered quartz is not all that uncommon. The quartz crystals are deposited in the inside of a hollow spot in the rock by volcanic action. Mineral rich hot water bubbles up through the rock, and deposits the mineral content on any hollow spot or crack it comes on. When the hollow is large enough it will form crystals. Silicone is one of the most abundant minerals on the face of the Earth. It is what we make glass out of, as well as all of the computer chips that are so commonplace now. Combined with other elements and certain impurities, it can form all sorts of different colored stones, rubies and emeralds to mention a couple.
In this case, there had been a couple of different times and levels of volcanic activity. It was beautiful, but not really all that valuable. I really didn’t want to disturb it, so the only person I ever told about it was Star.
We used the claim as a spot to meet and play house, so of course I took her down to the diggings and showed her the big vug with the crystals. Because of the stripe of amethyst she dubbed it “The Rainbow Room”. I thought it sounded kinda hokey, like a slimy lounge in some third rate hotel “Now appearing in The Rainbow Room………”
It became something that was uniquely ours, and I suppose that was one reason I had never done anything with it. Harvesting the crystals would be like selling The Mona Lisa so someone could salvage the pigments.
After a couple of drinks, the conversation smoothed out, the knots dissolved and things were feeling pretty comfortable. We had done a quite a bit of “Do you remember the time…..?”
We weren’t blitzed or anything. Well one thing led to another, and we ended up at my flat looking at the view of the Market and Elliot Bay. She moved so easily into my arms and felt so natural there. She arched her neck as I kissed my way down to the top of her blouse. And stopped.
“Star, do you think we ought to be doing this? I mean given our history, every time we get together, one or both of us get hurt.”
“Hell, Pat, we both know where we are, where we’ve been, but nobody knows where we might end up.”
I unbuttoned the top of her blouse.