THE FIND
“If the ground was wet, you might, if you were lucky, see a speck of blue….”
When I was a boy, my father and I sometimes went to Cripple Creek, Colorado, to hunt for turquoise. Cripple Creek is an old mining town—just a few miles from Independence lode, one of the largest gold strikes in American history—and in the 1960s and ’70s, its unpaved roads were covered with filings from the mines. Every summer I’d fly from Los Angeles to Denver to visit my father, and occasionally we’d drive through Garden of the Gods and Manitou Springs and Mueller State Park to Cripple Creek. This was decades before his death, and years before our relationship had frayed beyond repair.
On the way, I always hoped for rain. If the ground was wet, you might, if you were lucky, see a speck of blue—a shard of turquoise buried in the dirt and gravel. We combed the sides of the roads together, silently, looking for these tiny treasures: pebbles the size of a pencil’s eraser or, if fortune really struck, a nickel or even a quarter.
When my father found this chunk of turquoise—almost as big as his fist—he said, “You’re not gonna believe this.” He was right. Disbelief is exactly what I felt as he worked the dirt free with his callused fingers. Disbelief, envy, yearning.
I watched him clean the rock’s surface with his thumbs and some spit. Then I beheld the miraculous specimen: blue and black and jagged and awe-inspiring. The pieces I’d found felt, by comparison, practically worthless. He put the rock in his pocket and went back to scouring the gravel.
Did my eyes fill with tears as we continued up the road? Perhaps. I cried often on my summer visits. Not just because I wanted things I knew I could never have—a normal life, normal family, normal anything—but because I missed my mother and our home in California. My father’s sepulchral house, on the edge of a forest, 30 miles from Colorado Springs, was filled with the medieval manuscripts and carvings he bought and sold; everything about it made me anxious. Sometimes I cried because he lost his temper and yelled at me or whatever woman he was dating. I tried not to cry—it only made him angrier—but I couldn’t always help myself.
Every now and then when the two of us were driving on the highway, my father might reach into the glove compartment and take out a piece of wrapped candy for me—a butterscotch or peppermint, or a grape lollipop. Sometimes he handed me a silver dollar or plastic toy he’d picked up at the drugstore.
That summer I wished more than anything, of course, that he’d give me the piece of turquoise. I’d have to wait two full years for that gift. He gave it to me when I was ten and we were at the Denver airport and I was sobbing, because as much as I hated visiting him, I often found myself filled with sadness when I said goodbye.
—Matthew Lansburgh
Matthew Lansburgh’s story collection, Outside Is the Ocean, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review and Alaska Quarterly Review, and has been shortlisted in Best American Short Stories.