My old lungs were screaming at me and my legs were on fire by the time we had reached the top of arroyo. We got inside the truck and Shane backed it away from the edge to safer ground.
“Well, look at that,” I said to him.
A geyser of water was shooting up about ten feet above the rim of the arroyo. Shane got out of the truck and took a picture of it for Hannah. He couldn’t resist a selfie with the spout in the background. I was disappointed in the boy for indulging himself in such nonsense. To my way of thinking, a man that had to have a picture of everything that happened to him wouldn’t have many real memories to sustain him later. You didn’t remember life by taking pictures of it.
Hannah could barely talk when she called me that night because she had so much congestion in her chest. I assured her that we would go out again in the morning to inspect the cistern and drain any water that had accumulated in the well. I was worried about the concern she had with the cistern site. What was she going to do when the ranch was sold? I thought again about trying to do something in the sales contract that would assure she stayed involved once the property changed hands. I had not followed up on that with my attorney and I made a mental note to call Sam Hallinan and discuss the matter with him.
Sunny had finally returned to the ranch after seeing to her sister’s affairs. And none too soon, according to Katie after we had picked up Sunny at the airport. She likened her mother’s absence to not having a bunny rabbit. I couldn’t figure that one out, but I knew better than to question her Machiavellian logic.
The day after the geyser, Ariana mentioned she wasn’t feeling well at dinner and Sunny had put her right to bed. It was my job from that point on to keep Katie occupied and away from Ariana. Sunny went into one of her momma-bear worry spells about the number of children who had died because of the flu and she was constantly feeling Katie’s forehead every half hour. It drove Katie crazy. Once Sunny became involved with Ariana’s care, though, I had to monitor Kati’s temperature every half-hour and give her a report. That drove us both crazy and Katie and I agreed it wasn’t necessary to do it that often, but Sunny was relentless and hounded us both about the seriousness of the influenza outbreak in Texas. It was easier, faster, and less stressful to just take her temperature than listen to my sweet wife go on and on about it.
Sunny gave me a list of supplies she wanted me to pick up the next morning at Walgreens, including disposable flu face masks. She also made an appointment for me to take Katie into her pediatrician for a flu shot. I had my marching orders and so I tried to put everything else out of my mind for the time being, but I couldn’t. There was a sense of urgency to sell the Pape Ranch and I couldn’t put my finger on the source.
. . .
“I’m going to tell Momma,” Katie said.
We were at the cistern site, on the rim of the arroyo. I had told Katie to stay in the truck and under no circumstances was she to get down. Her threat to tell her mother that I left her in the truck by herself was her last attempt to persuade me not to leave her. She was still smarting at having gotten a flu shot when I didn’t, but more than that, she was still indignant at my cure for her hiccups. It was hard to say what bothered her most about the cure: That her daddy had scared the living daylight out of her or that it actually worked.
“It was your choice to wear shorts and sneakers this morning, Sweetpea. Those white legs of yours will sure make a tempting target for all the rattlesnakes around here.”
“Baloney,” she said with the confidence of an about-to-be eight-year-old girl.
“There’s no baloney here. The rain has driven those snakes out of their dens and they’re real hungry now. They’ll probably think your legs are a couple of nice tasting chicken legs.”
“Baloney. They’ll bite you too.”
“Yeah, but I had the good sense to wear my boots and you didn’t, even after I told you to. We’ll be back in a few minutes.” I said. I reached behind the seat and removed the shotgun. I unloaded it and put it in the bed of the truck and took the shells with me. Katie had a natural curiosity that had no bounds as far as I could ever tell and I didn’t want a weapon around her.
When we arrived at a point where we could see the cistern, we couldn’t. It was gone. The stones that had been used to make the cistern were scattered in a ten-foot radius around the site. The engraved center stone was face down and partially buried in the mud about two feet away from where it had stood.
“I’d better get some more pictures for Hannah,” Shane said and took out his phone. “She’s gonna be real upset.”
I walked over to where the cistern had once stood. I figured the plug was still intact inside the carved bottom chamber as several feet of muddy water in the cistern wasn’t draining. The crevice where the spring had once been was now enlarged and a trickle of water was seeping out of it. I noticed some white flat pieces of small stone in the hole and for the first time I noticed similar pieces lying about the site. I picked up a piece from the mud and rubbed it with my thumb. It was an encrusted piece of light greenish stone. I recognized the white deposit on the stone as coming from the heavily mineral laden water in the limestone. It was a normal part of living in the Hill Country and most people that had a well preferred the heavy mineral water to city purified water.
“Shane, be careful where you step. I think we found the Death Mask.”
I walked over to where he was and showed him the piece. I had him take a picture of it and then stuck the jade in my pocket for Hannah.
I looked at my watch. We had been gone from the truck for about thirty minutes and too long for a curious kid like Katie.
“We should head back,” I said.
“I don’t know if I can tell Hannah, Max. It’s going to crush her.”
“She needs to hear it from you, Shane. Let me find someone to watch Katie and then you and I’ll spend the day collecting all the pieces of the Death Mask we can find. We don’t want another gulley washer to carry the rest of it down to the Guadalupe.”
“She’s gonna want to be here,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You make sure she stays in bed. You and I can handle it.”
“The Death Mask must have been stuck in that hydro tunnel all these years. The pressure behind it became greater than the resistance and it blew.”
“The rain that came down directly over the hydro tunnel’s reservoir must have been fast and heavy wherever it was,” I said.
“Yeah, it came down pretty hard for a couple of hours while I was out here. I couldn’t see more’n a couple inches in front of me. What are we going to do about the cistern now?”
“It can be put back together. I’ll let the potential buyers know it’s been rebuilt, if they want the property.”
When we reached the truck, Katie was behind the wheel watching us walk over. Evidently, she had been practicing her driving. I’d hinted to her before that I might consider teaching her when she turned ten.
I climbed up into the truck and grabbed a bottle of water, while Shane called Hannah. I watched him arguing with her while I drank. Hannah evidently wanted to come and help us search for the jade pieces. I reconsidered leaving the scene to take Katie home and decided to stay. Shane might not be able to control Hannah, but I could; I was her boss.
“You feel like helping us search for pieces of a treasure?”
“Really, a treasure?”
“We need all the eyes we can get,” I said and took out the jade piece from my pocket. I handed it to her.
“What is it?” She turned it over and examined it. “Is it valuable?”
“Yes, it is. It’s called jade. The Maya Indians considered jade more valuable than gold. They made a mask out of pieces like this.”
“What kind of mask?”
“I don’t know. All we have are the pieces. We need to find all of them so we can put the mask back together and see what it looks like.”
“I can help. You know I’m good at puzzles.”
&n
bsp; “Okay. If you’re going to help us, you need to be very careful where you step. We don’t want to step on a piece and loose it in the mud.”
I could see her frown and knew exactly what the problem was going to be. She didn’t like mud. I had no idea where her aversion to mud came from and wasn’t going to pursue it now. I should have thought of that.
“You know, what would really be a help is if you checked each piece that Shane and I find to see if it’s really jade,” I said. “That way you don’t have to get down in the mud with us.”
That seemed to please her and would keep her occupied. I rubbed the jade piece on my jeans. It removed some the limestone mineral deposit that had coated the pieces over the years, but it was obvious the individual pieces would have to be cleaned professionally before the mask was reassembled.
“See the light green color beneath the dirt. You don’t have to clean the whole piece, just enough to see if it’s green. That way we know it’s a keeper.”
“I can do that.”
“Good, let’s go see what Shane has to say.”
“What about the rattlesnakes?”
“Shane and I cleared them out of here. I doubt there’s any left around.”
She eyed me and realized I had manipulated her. She jumped out of the truck and stormed over to Shane.
“She’s coming out,” Shane said as I headed toward him. He put his phone in his back pocket.
“I don’t want her here. She needs to stay in bed. We’ll find what we can and she can come out to the site when she’s feeling better. Call her back,” I said.
“She hung up on me,” he said and looked bewildered. His inability to influence Hannah had actually perplexed the boy. There wasn’t much I could say that would console him. Machismo was overrated and less than half the population believed its major tenet anyway. He called her back, but she didn’t answer his call.
Fifteen minutes later I had Katie seated on one of the cistern’s stones wiping the jade pieces that we’d found with my bandana. She had a green pile and a second pile that anything not green went into. I’d let Hannah deal with the piles and sorting out what we had picked up when she felt better.
We heard Hannah honk her horn on the rim when she arrived. We had pretty much covered most of the area in front of the cistern and picked up all the visible pieces of jade.
Shane’s phone rang. “Yeah, babe?”
“Tell her, I said not to come down here or she’s fired.”
Shane smirked. “Okay, I’m coming,” he said to Hannah. Shane headed back up to the rim.
“Where’s he going?” Katie asked.
“That’s Hannah up there on the rim. He’s going to talk to her.”
“Why don’t you want her down here?” Katie said suspiciously. “You said there weren’t any rattlesnakes.”
“Well, for one thing, she’s sick with the flu and should be in bed, and secondly, I don’t want you to be exposed to her. And you’re right, there aren’t any rattlesnakes anymore.”
I inspected the green pile of shards. It was smaller than the pile of discards. I picked one up from the discard pile and rubbed it. It looked like the others pieces of jade but the green wasn’t there after a rubbing with my thumb. It was more pinkish than green.
“You did a good job, Katie, darl’n. Thank you.”
“Can I help put the mask together?”
“I don’t see why not. We’ll ask Hannah if you can help her when she’s feeling better.”
I called Shane on his phone.
“Yeah, Max?”
“What’s going on up there?”
“I have it under control. Hannah is going back to San Antonio.”
“Good. We need some buckets or containers. Can you go up to the ranch house and get something to carry the jade pieces in?”
“I’m on the way down.”
When Shane came into view down in the arroyo itself, he was carrying what looked to be a serving tray out in front of him with a few things piled on it. When he got closer I could see a hand shovel and canvass bags. The serving tray turned out to be a small rectangular wooden form with a screen on the bottom.
“Man! I’ve never seen Hannah like this. She is really mad.”
“Did she go home?”
“Only because I told her what you said. Well, that and she didn’t want you to see her. She looked like she’d been run over by our grader.”
“I’d guess by the tools you have, she left some instructions for us.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Well, get to work. I’m going to run Katie home, pick us up some lunch, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours or less. I’ll leave some water up top for you. Keep that shotgun within easy reach, too,” I said.”
. . .
I had a lunch po-boy from Bob’s Ribs on the seat beside me and was headed back out to the Pape Ranch. Emily had agreed to keep an eye on Katie at the Meeting Center for me until three. Seems Ted had come down sick, too, and she needed to get home to tend to him. I had just dropped Katie off after a couple of brisket po-boys at Bob’s. I still had my list in my pocket that Sunny had given me that I needed to take care of. I called to check on her.
“Hi, Sweetheart. How are you and Ariana doing?”
“We’ll make it. I just got off the phone with Emily. Why’d you drop off Katie?”
“I need to feed Shane and then give him a hand. I’m going to pick her up at three o’clock, get the supplies, and then come home in time to feed you guys. What do you feel like?”
“Get some soup for Ariana. I’ll take a salad.”
“Not from the salad bar with this flu. I’ll get a bag of mixed greens and some veggies and you can graze to your heart’s content. I might let you have some of Katie’s and my pizza if we have a slice left.”
“Not after that po-boy for lunch. You forget the pizza. We’ll all have a salad tonight.”
I sure hoped she hadn’t found my stash in the freezer. I had my mouth all set for a pizza and man worth his salt ate what his stomach craved not what his wife dictated.
When I arrived at the cistern site I took over for Shane while he ate and drank the water I’d brought down for him. He hadn’t taken any time to walk up top for the water bottles. The man was a hard worker, no doubt about it, and the reason I had hired him in the first place. I understood well that for a man to be successful he had to surround himself with people who worked harder than he did.
I was going through the shovelful of loose debris that was in the screen and I could see Shane had gotten through most of the area immediately in front of the cistern. There was, however, a long stream of drying mud that extended down the arroyo for at least twenty yards that we would have to go through. What we needed was access to water to wash down the mud over the screen.
I finished what was in the screener and decided we needed some help.
“You think you can get your crew out here again?”
“No. They won’t work for us anymore. Miquel‒he does all the talking for the men‒said the place is cursed.”
“The hell with them. Go hire another crew of three or four men for tomorrow. We need to get that stream of mud through the screen before we have another rain.”
We packed up the piles of jade and the jade discards and carried them up to the truck. I called the contractor that was working on the ranch house while Shane drove. I told him to be out there first thing in the morning with the best stone mason he knew and the supplies to rebuild the stone cistern. I started to ask Hector if he still employed Hank, but decided Hank had nothing to do with the destruction of the capstone so I let it go.
. . .
The next morning, Katie and I were supervising the work at the site. My foreman, Clete, had brought along a hundred-gallon fiberglass water tank we used for the garden during the dry season. It was structurally reinforced so it was easy to load in the old flatbed truck we had on the ranch. Once we got to the Pape Ranch we filled it with water and drove out to the rim of the ar
royo. Clete was feeding the hose down to one of the men. I figured the elevation would give us enough pressure to dissolve the clumps of mud the men were shoveling into wheelbarrows.
“Man, that must’ve been something,” Clete said as he eyed the damage below.
“I want to sort the jade,” Katie said.
I had explained what we were going to do with the jade pieces we collected and she had boasted to her mother that she was now an archeologist. Never mind that she had a hard time pronouncing the word archeologist, she was just like Hannah and Ava. She was Texas A&M bound in another nine years and my heart had swelled with pride.
“They can use a hand on the screen. Just remember not to throw anything away,” I said to her.
“I know that,” she informed me.
By noon we had an assembly line going and making good progress over the screen. A stone mason was busy moving the stones of the cistern into a pattern on the ground starting with the first two levels and the center stone. Shane had sent the images of the cistern that we had taken to the contractor’s phone.
I walked over to him. “What do you think?” I said.
“We have all the stones. How do you want to put it back together? They didn’t carry in bags of ready-mix to make the cistern. They would have made the mortar on site.”
“Gee, Hector, I would’ve never thought of that,” I said to mess with him. “Better put it back together like we found it. There ought to be enough mortar left on the stones to know what they used.”
“Oh, I know what they used back then. I’ve done restoration work before. It just moves the cost into another price range. Do you have a permit?”
“For what?” I asked.
Hector Guerrero shook his head at me and smiled. “It’s gonna cost you mucho dinero, my friend.”
“That doesn’t surprise me one bit. How much without the permit? And regular mortar?”
“Not much less, but I got to think about that. I could get in a lot of trouble working on a historical site without proper permits.”
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 30