by James Short
Philip was preparing to slide deeper into this poisonously sweet melancholy when he noticed that a very old man had slipped into the booth seat. So old was the gentleman that the lack of teeth had compressed his lower jaw and gravity had dragged down his features making his ears and nose hang heavily from the wide face. His complexion had probably once been olive, but the decades had layered on a green patina and stained the sagging skin under his eyes with permanent purple bruises. His few strands of hair were combed back in an attempt at style. He wore a suit that probably has fitted him a quarter century back when there had been much more of him to fill a suit. The only relic of youth left were the eyes—sharp brown dots, still greedy with desire and fixed on Philip in an odd unnerving way.
“I have a message for you.” the scratchy voice worked into Philip’s eardrums like an awl into soft leather. The old man paused, his eyes seeming to consume the remaining quarter inch of coffee in the cup and the crumbs of coconut cream pie on an uncleared plate, and then without changing their devouring intensity, he turned to Philip again.
“From whom?” Despite its impossibility, hope rose in him that April was behind this visitor’s presence.
“Jacinto told me to give you this message.” The old man moistened his lips.
“Okay,” Philip responded, marveling at the ability of hope to bounce off any surface, real or imagined. “I don’t know any Jacinto, so I think you must have the wrong man.”
“Of course, you don’t know him.” The awl of his voice dug deeper in this new hectoring tone. “He’s dead. But I think I do have the right man. The hard thing is to make sense of his message. I haven’t been able to get at its meaning, despite the fact that I’m his son and have spent forty years trying to figure it out.”
“Excuse me, sir, I understand you are well-meaning, but this has been an extremely trying evening already,” Philip explained. “I don’t think I have it in me to listen to a message from the dead.”
“He was alive when he gave it.”
“Alive you say? And he told you my name and where to find me?”
“Did I say I knew your name? My name is Gaspar. That’s neither here nor there. He just instructed me to look for the worthy man. You are that worthy man.”
Philip shook his head, “Worthy? What do you mean? Worthy for what?”
“The treasure, you damn fool! Are you such a child that I have to explain the obvious? I’m certain those three gentlemen who sat at this table talked about an individual called Old Goose. Jacinto was the Old Goose, and the Old Goose was my father. My father, Old Goose, told me that he knew where the treasure was buried. He claimed he hadn’t touched it himself, but he said it was there for the worthy man who would understand the clues. He said I would recognize the worthy man when I saw him.
“Now I’ve tried to be the worthy man myself, but I can’t make heads or tails of the clues so obviously I am not. As for you, I can’t say I’m certain you are, however, neither can I say you aren’t, which I can definitely say about everybody else. So it’s your turn. If you can’t do anything with the clues, then you can find your own worthy man.”
“I’ve never been good at riddles. Furthermore, I think your story is a crock.”
Gasper bared his very long yellow teeth. “The first clue is where does an honest man hide a stolen fortune?”
“He doesn’t.”
“Does that answer help us find the treasure? My father also said that you had to look where many have looked before. I personally haven’t found that clue useful either. Everybody has looked everywhere. So what? And, lastly, my father claimed you must trade a thing equal in value to the treasure to get the treasure.”
“That is like getting no return on your investment.”
“I think my father just added that clue to discourage me from searching. Finally, he told me to hand this over to you.” The man produced a small gold coin and handed it to Philip. “Good luck. If you knew me, you would realize how hard it is for me to part with this.”
He snatched the coin away, squeezed it tightly, and then placed it gently back into Philip’s hand. Sighing, the old man pushed and pulled himself out of the booth, tottering eventually into a standing position, and hobbled off, shaking his head slowly, cuffs of trousers dragging, head sunken to the level of his shoulders.
Philip examined the gold coin which showed an eagle with wings outstretched behind a shield and haloed by stars. The denomination was twenty, and it was dated 1849. If it were real, how much would it be worth? $5,000? $10,000? More?
Someone has mistaken me for a worthy man, Philip commented to himself, turning cynical now that his karmic hypothesis seemed to be working. Worthy for what? To be made a fool of? Because of a few obscure clues, I’m supposed to find what thousands haven’t. Thank you, Mr. Goose. I have nothing better to do, so I will play along with this small jest for a little while.
Philip paid the bill which the treasure hunters had left for him to cover. He decided against leaving the coin as a tip, then he stepped outside.
How can one tell that a town is gripped by a collective insomnia? Lights flashed in the hills where it had been dark on previous nights. The onshore breeze tasted of ash. Panic had been added to the perfumes of flowers and brine in the air.
Philip shook his head to clear it and wondered how to take that strange interview. So what would he do with a fortune? How many Aprils or her look-alikes could he buy with a pot of gold? She was too rare, yet perhaps finding the treasure might cause April to doubt her behavior, might force her to consider the notion: “Did Philip possess qualities I could never find in another man—a rare ability to perceive what a thousand others couldn’t, a virtuosity that doesn’t yet have a name, which, had I been a little more patient, would have been all mine?”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” said a plump middle-aged man strolling beside him.
“Where did you come from?” Philip asked, miffed and surprised.
“Why you, I came from you. You needed me, so you conjured me up. At least, that’s how I explain me to myself.” His companion smiled affably.
“If you come from my imagination, how is it I don’t know what you’re going to say next?” Philip asked.
His companion shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, you know, subconscious forces at play, repressed desires coming out, multiple personality disorders, dissociative disorders, et cetera, et cetera. Take your choice.”
“Don’t tell me you’re Jacinto.”
“How did you guess?” Jacinto indulged in a deep, satisfied laugh.
“So now where’s the treasure?” Philip demanded.
“Being a figment of your imagination, I couldn’t possibly tell you where the treasure was unless you subconsciously knew where it was, which I doubt, however, I will keep you company while you look for it.”
“Okay, I’m not so sure you’re not a ghost. But since you’re here to entertain me with what must be my own imagination, I think a good starting point is for you to explain to me what actually happened the night the lovers went over the cliff.”
“I’ll treat your question as if you weren’t trying to trick me. Coming from you, I cannot swear the information is absolutely accurate as to the true course of events, however, I can help. To begin, we must correct some details of the poorly written pamphlet.”
“How could you correct something I don’t know since you are me?”
“Because you do know.”
“But if you can tell me anything I don’t know, then you must be a ghost.”
Jacinto sighed. “I suppose I am, if you want to be technical, however then if we are really precise, figments and ghosts are related species belonging to the same general family like donkeys and zebras.”
Philip unsuccessfully tried to puzzle this out. “I don’t get you, but have it your way.”
“My way is to tell the history, which will be more relevant than it first appears. Let’s go down this road. A nice breeze lifts off the ocean at this hour that will h
elp me clear my memory. Death is terrible for your memory. The problem isn’t that you forget things, it’s that once you’re accustomed to a timeless world it is difficult to put events in chronological order. Oh well, we’ll begin by dispensing with me. I was born in the north of Portugal in a castle guarding a secluded valley, the bastard son of a noble. After many adventures, most of them unpleasant like seven years underground driving a donkey through the narrow tunnels of Brazilian gold mines, I arrived at Solvidado and became its undertaker.”
“I never knew there were gold mines in Brazil.”
“Can you be certain you never subconsciously knew? Let’s move on from me? To understand what occurred we must describe the lover and thief Tomàs—that was his real name, not Thomas.” Jacinto shook his head in disgust at the inaccuracy. “He was the only son of Galinda Rodriguez, a mestizo maiden and Amory Deering, a charming, handsome unsuccessful forty-niner and incompetent petty criminal. Amory accidentally shot himself in the head while cleaning a gun when Tomàs was eight. Galinda died of consumption when he was nine. So Tomàs became a true child of the Flats of Solvidado.”
Jacinto pointed out into the night in the general direction of the sea. “The Flats was a marshy area where we poorer sort lived—Mexicans, Indians, half-breeds, down-and-out forty-niners, abandoned women and anyone else who didn’t quite fit into the town proper which lay a quarter mile up from the bay.
“By true child, I mean the boy with the bright smile was welcomed in any of the fifty-four shacks and lean-tos which housed the thriving population of the Flats. The mothers of the Flats sewed and patched his clothes, cut his hair and nursed him when he was sick. The men of the Flats taught him how to fish and hunt and ride a horse like a true Californio and invent those eloquent compliments which made flirtation into a true art. He mastered all those skills and probably could have succeeded in any profession, yet being essentially a restless spirit who saw the world as a game of chance and skill, Tomàs followed the path of his father.”
Philip stared hard at Jacinto in an effort to see through him.
His very solid companion went on to explain that by the age of eighteen, Tomàs had left the Flats and soon was leading a band of outlaws. The band included Felipe del Mar who could glance through a door (such as one leading into a bank) and remember everything he saw when sober, and double everything, when not. And Solomon Hope, the child of an African father and a Cherokee mother, who boasted that he had once tired out a pack of dogs and three mounted bounty hunters over a run of ten counties. Jinn, another member of the gang, was the son of a German prince and a South Seas island woman and possessed a natural or rather unnatural sangfroid. The wilder the situation, the calmer he became. The gringo twin brothers Guy and Galahad Smith rounded out the gang. They were competent bank robbers and as identical as two pennies from the same mint.
During a period of four months, Tomàs’s gang robbed eight different banks the length of the Golden State, from San Diego to Eureka. They gained a reputation for speed and finesse—so fast and smooth it was hard for the bank clerks and customers to believe that over the course of the last minute, they had just been cleaned out. A few ladies even lost their hearts to the bright black eyes of the courteous young man who tipped his hat to them and bestowed a compliment on their dresses or their children, all the while keeping a gun trained on the bank manager. Gunplay rarely occurred. Tomàs counseled the men: “If you steal money, sooner or later, they’ll stop coming after you, if you take a life, they won’t ever.”
When eventually the band had gained enough notoriety that the wanted posters increased in the accuracy of their depictions, especially of Felipe and the twins, and more banks began to hire armed guards, Tomàs decided to switch tactics and hold up stagecoaches. In this venture, he wasn’t entirely successful.
On a dusty August afternoon in the rolling scrub oak terrain of California’s coastal valley, Tomàs and his men blocked the road just after a turn with a felled tree. This would be a rich haul. A bank in San Francisco was sending to a large rancher in Santa Barbara ten thousand in gold coin to buy land from an old Californio family. There was a false floor in the stagecoach where the gold was hidden.
Tomàs knew these details because he ran across by chance in a Santa Barbara cantina a cousin who was a maid to the wife of the Californio. This silly cousin had a weakness for showing up her undistinguished relatives from Solvidado by talking about the great wealth she was privileged to serve. The foolish girl couldn’t imagine anyone using her boasts for their own ends. Tomàs pretended the envy which so pleased his cousin that he was able to lure out of her all the details. Even before she ceased in her effusions, he had a good part of the business planned.
The trap was set neatly. His men had taken up positions, each at a special vantage point, so wherever the driver and shotgun rider turned, they would be looking down the barrel of a gun. Facing certain death if they resisted, they would act like reasonable men and throw down their weapons.
The passengers would exit at gunpoint and stand hands in the air in front of the stagecoach. The more cowardly among them might have trouble controlling their trembling knees and queasy bladders. The women might be weeping. They didn’t need to worry with Tomàs. He had no interest in robbing the weak and powerless. The courteous young man would tip his hat to them, then enter the stagecoach, break open the false floor with a small ax and extract the gold before the astonished eyes of the passengers. His gang would then ride off with the treasure, horses, and firearms, causing the passengers, shotgun rider and driver the inconvenience of walking fifteen miles to the next town.
Exposed on an empty road with the nearest help hours away, a stagecoach would be simpler to rob than a bank Tomàs had reasoned. Tomàs usually reasoned soundly. However, he hadn’t counted on the driver of the stagecoach being Chili Watson, so named because he kept a chili pepper tucked between his cheek and gum. Chili’s attitude towards life, like many people, resembled his attitude towards his mouth.
Nor had Tomàs fully appreciated the reputation of the shotgun rider, Bill Milton, or Gimpy Milton as he was called in those blunt times. Bill was born with a withered leg. Unable to run around and play like other children, he spent his formative years perfecting his marksmanship. Tales about his skill abounded. One of the fanciful stories had him shooting a bullet from one rifle at a hundred paces into the barrel of a rifle of a slightly higher caliber. Bill had shot several men over the years, always on the side of the law, which was the convenient side to be on for a man who liked to kill.
When Chili saw the tree blocking the road, he spat the pepper out of his mouth. He hated amateurs. The tree wasn’t big enough around to do the job. He snapped the whip and gave a peculiar yelp that communicated to the horses that the demons of hell were chasing them. Picking up speed, the stagecoach crashed over the trunk and through the branches.
Within two minutes of the pursuit, Bill had winged Guy, scored a bull’s eye on the forehead of Galahad, another in the neck of Solomon and shot Tomàs’s horse out from underneath him. They would have escaped if it hadn’t been for a damaged wheel that came off two miles into the pursuit, making the coach careen off the road and down a slope into a rock. Chili’s shoulder was broken in the fall, and Bill was knocked unconscious.
Tomàs was a mile away and horseless when Chili surrendered. By the time he caught up, Guy, Jinn, and Felipe had enforced their own version of justice. Guy had shot Bill in the head where he lay, Jinn and Felipe then executed Chili and the passengers—father, mother, and two sons—firing squad style. On seeing Tomàs, the three of them grinned and pointed to the bodies as if they were hunting trophies.
Tomàs stared in horror at a boy no more than twelve clutching his mother’s hand in death.
“I’ve never cottoned to just getting even,” Jinn said.
Before he was even aware of his fury, Tomàs drew his revolver and shot his three surviving companions dead before they could wipe the smiles off their faces. Then he broke op
en the floor of the stagecoach with his ax and lifted out the bags of gold coins. Eleven bloody dead bodies lay around him. The guilt was his alone to bear. If he had been a truly brave man, Tomàs always believed, he would have given justice the final act and joined the eleven dead.
Four nights later, a hundred and fifty miles up the coast, Tomàs returned the gold to the earth, weeping as he buried it in a ravine just off an old logging road that led to Solvidado. He resolved never to touch the money, and he grieved that he could never wash its blood off his hands.
The Thief’s Strange Proposal
April gasped and quickly drew the coverlet up to her chin as a man emerged from behind the curtains. With a noiseless feline grace, he moved to the foot of her bed. Although not a large man, he was scary. The black spandex pants and black T-shirt molded to the contours of his body, which appeared to be all spring and muscle. His hands were sheathed in black gloves, his feet shod in black sneakers, looped over his shoulder was a small pack. He had a high forehead, dark hair, a long nose with a quizzical bend at its end, and eyes somewhere between cobalt and black. As April glanced around the room futilely for a weapon to defend herself, a smile crossed the intruder’s face revealing teeth that appeared to have been sharpened.
“How dare you come into my room! If you don’t leave this instant, I’ll scream!” April said, determined to make her visitor pay a high price for whatever mayhem he intended.
“Let me introduce myself…” The man maintained his carnivorous smile.
“I’m warning you I can scream so loud that everyone in this hotel will hear and come running.”
“Okay, since you insist.” He folded his arms.
Her cry started out with impressive volume, then dwindled quickly like the sound of a receding siren. April was stumped.