by James Short
At last the shrill whistle—the signal from Jacinto—penetrated the sound of the waves. Over the sharp and slippery stones and through the surging water that knocked them backward twice, they waded, Tomàs supporting Penny, then swimming with one arm while holding her with the other. She didn’t struggle or panic despite taking in several gulps of seawater.
On seeing Penelope and Tom instead of Franklin, Jacinto scolded Tomàs in Portuguese, then said to Penelope in English: “Do not marry a man who puts you in so much bad danger.”
Penelope giggled, found Tom’s hand, squeezed it, and as Jacinto rowed through the fog, whispered—“Is this what people call fun?”
Kurtz certainly wasn’t disposed to believe Franklin’s claim that he had collided with him to save him from going over the cliff. That and a lot of other things didn’t make sense to him.
“How can I get down there?” Kurtz asked. “The gold, the bodies and anything else in that goddamn mess belong to me.”
“We can lower you down by rope, or you can try getting there in a boat,” Thornton said.
Kurtz glared at him. “I’m not going to be dangled over the cliff like bait on a hook. Who’s your best sailor?”
“I can take you,” Franklin offered.
“Why would you do that?”
Franklin held out a gold coin. “I want more of these.”
“I guess the fact you’re a poor liar, nigger, doesn’t prevent you from steering me to them rocks. Anyway, it will give us the chance to talk things through, and afterward maybe reconcile our remaining differences by introducing you to my old friend, Ed Bergen.”
Franklin piloted the lateen-rigged fishing boat. There was no wind so the sail was furled. Kurtz stood, bracing himself on the naked mast. A greenish-hued pistolero sat on the bow; another one rowed inexpertly in the long swells that pushed them relentlessly towards the rocks. It was obvious to anyone who knew the business of landing boats that they couldn’t approach the rocks in such rough surf. Kurtz, of course, ignored Franklin’s advice.
Spotting a large flat ledge half submerged in the surf, Kurtz yelled, “That’s where you’re going to set her.” No sane sailor would attempt to land a craft there. And even if it could be accomplished, fifty feet of foaming turbulence separated that place from the remnants of the wagon and the corpse.
When they neared the flat ledge, Franklin jumped out with a rope in his teeth, swam ten yards through the heaving water to the rock. Just as he reached it, a wave swamped the rock, and he was engulfed by a three-foot wall of foam. Necessarily he had to swallow a quart of seawater to hold on to the line but managed to do so, and when the watery wall crumbled, he pulled himself onto the ledge.
In the following large swell, the boat was pushed forward, lifted and gently let down into a crevice between two jagged rocky points. For the next several minutes after the water had receded, the boat was helplessly wedged. Wave after wave poured over the gunwales, filling the boat like a bucket. The men frantically bailed. Kurtz jumped out and struggled chest-deep through the surf towards the wreckage and the corpse. Suddenly a surging backflow lifted the boat up, freeing it. Franklin released the line. The sick man scrambled back to the tiller but had no idea how to handle it, and the oarsman only seemed able to spin the boat around as they drifted away from the shore.
Franklin jumped into the water and swam towards Kurtz, dreading what he would find. The larger parts of the wagon floating among the rocks were gradually being broken into boards and splinters by the waves and backflow. The carcasses of the horses, still in harness, were draped in absurd postures over an outcropping, and the half-charred body of the woman dressed in Penelope’s clothes lay face down in a tide pool. Several gold coins glinted in the crevices, mussel shoals, and shallow pools, but Tom’s body was missing.
Kurtz turned over the faceless corpse of the woman, gasped, then shook his head. “Where’s Deering’s goddamn body?” he yelled.
Franklin didn’t answer, afraid his relief would show in his voice. The mangled faceless corpse was what Jacinto promised they would find.
“The body! Where’s Deering’s goddamn body?” Kurtz stood waist-deep in churning water. He had just picked up a plank that had served as a seat to the wagon. A wave smashed into him making about as much impression as it had on the rocks. “I don’t fucking see it.”
“Tide probably carried it out,” Franklin replied.
“Expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything, sir, but either the tide took his body out, or it’s submerged nearby.” Franklin gestured to the half-acre of rubble in their vicinity.
Kurtz waded towards Franklin. “Then you’ll just have to look for it until you find it, darky.”
“I regret to inform you, sir, that’s not my job. So you can either look for the body yourself, or you can lower your men down, and they can look for it.”
Franklin was half a head taller, but the rancher was broader and stronger. Kurtz’s fist lashed out, connecting below Franklin’s eye. Franklin had felt harder blows, though this was memorably painful, it was also curious. This man was trying to engage in fisticuffs waist deep in water—obviously, he was a stranger to the element. “No nigger will…”
Kurtz didn’t finish the sentence. Franklin grabbed him by the hair on the back of the head, enduring three sharp blows in the process. The momentum, however, was with him. Franklin slipped his other arm around the thick tough neck, dropped his hand, locked both arms together, tightened his elbow right under the chin and using his body as a lever, swung Kurtz off balance. Franklin lost his footing also, but because he was holding Kurtz’s head to his chest, Kurtz’s face hit the water first.
Leaning with his whole weight, Franklin kept him submerged. The struggle was fierce, with Kurtz trying to bite Franklin’s arm and claw his genitals. Then the wild animal panic of a drowning man replaced the viciousness of a cruel man, nearly bucking off Franklin a dozen times.
Setting his sights on a rock two feet away just under the surface of the water, Franklin lifted Kurtz up. His flailings decreased as his lungs engorged the air. Franklin threw himself at the rough pocked stone; Kurtz’s forehead took the greater part of the initial shock, although Franklin’s forearms were also scraped. He heaved himself up and again threw himself onto the rock, Kurtz’s face absorbing most of the impact. After a third time, he lifted Kurtz up by the hair and observed him wildly spitting blood and trying to catch his breath, then dunked him, and continued pounding Kurtz’s temple and ear against the rock.
Franklin had never considered himself a man who took pleasure in cruelty; but now his blood was running high, and he wanted to make sure that Kurtz was physically disabled, at least temporarily. Franklin finally let Kurtz up. It had taken a great effort of moral will to not continue bashing the head against the stone until life was battered out of it.
While the rancher sat gagging and spitting up blood and water and pieces of teeth, Franklin said, “Your time is up here. Tom and Penny are dead. Your boys aren’t going to stop looking for gold to do your bidding. All the other folk in this town are your enemy.”
Kurtz sank back gaping, water still coming in short heaves from his mouth. Franklin reached for him, and he flinched.
Kurtz was too badly injured to leave Solvidado immediately. He spent a week laying on a divan in the parlor of the Boller House, his face swathed in bandages, nearly fainting every time he tried to stand, his orders misunderstood, and, worst of all, having to endure Madeleine Boller’s cackling visits. He would never likely breathe properly again through his nose, or, with his broken teeth eat without being reminded of the beating.
When Kurtz was told Tom’s body was discovered on a beach a few miles north, his suspicions weren’t allayed. He demanded that the graves of Tom and Penelope be dug up. By then, however, the men of Solvidado proper and the Flats had gained the upper hand. With the assistance of the sporting ladies of Madame Cherise’s establishment, half of Kurtz’s band had been d
eprived of their firearms. Five were in jail. Two had been killed by Dorcas Halloway’s brothers defending their sister’s honor. It became convenient for Kurtz’s pistoleros who still wanted to search for coins spilled in the chase to pretend not to understand their boss, knowing that the townsfolk would only tolerate their presence if they behaved.
Realizing this, Kurtz claimed he was broke and any money to be got had to be found. Most of his band eventually drifted away, tiring of the search that only turned up a few more coins. The morning after the hired coach took Kurtz away, Tomàs’s coffin was discovered next to the grave with the lid pried off. This was Kurtz’s last insult to Solvidado. He had wanted to see the scars on the back of Tomàs’s corpse. Whether he could after three weeks of putrefaction in the moist soil was an interesting question to which nobody desired to find an answer. Jacinto reburied Tomàs’s coffin because he was the only one who could go near it without experiencing an irrepressible urge to vomit.
That morning three weeks before while Kurtz and Franklin were fighting beneath the cliff, a skiff landed on a beach north of Solvidado and let off Jacinto. There was an awkward moment between Tom, Penny and the Portuguese undertaker. Thanks seemed so insufficient.
“Too much ballast,” Tomàs said and unloaded the canvas sacks of gold.
Jacinto protested, “Do not be fool. You need gold as much as you need love in new life.”
“Too much ballast,” Tomàs insisted. “It belongs to you and Franklin now. My payment for your help.”
“What will we do with so much?” Jacinto protested.
“Do what an honest man would do!” Tomàs shouted as he guided the boat through the surf. “Hear me? Do what a good honest man would do!” The sound of the couple’s laughter came back over the waves.
The Great Porcine Count
April and Philip fell silent as they turned down the empty street which led to the museum. Suddenly, Jacinto appeared walking beside Philip and whispered in his ear, “How were you able to persuade this ravishing creature to marry you?”
“April no longer wants me as a husband,” Philip replied in a half mumble so it would appear he was muttering to himself.
“A pity. Women give a little bit of heaven and a little bit of hell, but it’s everything else in-between which really matters. Your April here has already guessed about the bodies. The tramp supplied Tomàs’s double, and I had recently buried a widow of about forty who had committed suicide by adding a teaspoon of arsenic to her sherry. Not quite the right ages, but close enough. Bodies don’t age like faces, you see. The work I did with the tramp and that poor gentle lady, dressing them in Tomàs and Penelope’s clothes, and preparing them for our purposes nobody except a man with my familiarity with the dead could do. I always had a strong stomach. Suffice to say I wanted only their sexes recognizable.”
“And what did you do with the gold?” Although Philip saw Jacinto plainly, the conversation occurred in his head.
“I tried to give it to Franklin. He refused. Tomàs had said do what a good man would do, so I needed time to figure things out. Despite recent outlays, the coins still filled two heavy bags. What would a good man do with two bags of gold, which at that moment several hundred people were turning the town inside out and upside down in their efforts to find?”
“You gave the gold to a charitable cause?”
“It didn’t quite happen that way. I was under suspicion so my first problem was where to hide the treasure. I put the bags next to the fish heads and potato peels for El Gran Conde, thinking nobody would imagine they were in plain sight. As I had told you, the last time I put the gold near that noble beast, he pushed and strained to get his head through the fence. Well, the temptation was too much for El Gran Conde. He broke through the stout redwood planks, bypassed the fish inwards and the peels, and like a true aristocrat with a nose for real value consumed the gold.
By the time I had discovered my mistake, he had devoured the two bags almost in their entirety. When I yelled at him and tugged the last shreds of canvas with the few remaining coins away, he eyed me with malicious glee, swallowed the gold piece in his mouth, plopped down contentedly, sated for the first time in his life. My anger soon left me when it came to me that I had found the perfect hiding place.
“Over the following months, I kept re-feeding the gold to El Gran Conde. It got so he wouldn’t take food if it didn’t contain several dozen eagles or double eagles. That was his minimum. The rest of the town was obsessed with finding what The Great Count expected in his daily slops. One night I was visited by a delegation of treasure hunters. They tied me up, tore down my shack and dug holes all over my property. They looked everywhere except in the pig shit. The gold fever subsided after half a year.
“With the absence of Tomàs and Penelope, the soul seemed to have gone out of the town. A man really couldn’t get ahead here. Solvidado was a pretty place, but it is awfully hard to scratch a decent living from the small strip of fertile soil between the hills and the ocean. Also, the bay wasn’t protected from the westerly winds, and in strong blows, the boats either had to be small enough to beach or big enough to put out to sea. Henry Boller had already logged the redwoods easiest to get to. Just over the hills, the soil was so fertile that a man could merely sow the seeds and then sleep until harvest. Up and down the coast, there were larger bays and safer harbors.”
Jacinto sighed a ghostly sigh. “The people in Solvidado wanted a future, not stare at the beauty of nature from the vantage point of irredeemable poverty. An outbreak of cholera killed about a quarter of those who stayed. After that, it just seemed people were plain tired, tired even of being alive. I finally slaughtered El Gran Conde, that highborn guard of the treasure, emptied his entrails of hundreds of coins and recovered the rest from the manure in his sty. On a black midnight, I went into the hills and hid the treasure in a hole beneath a heavy stone, not a coin touched. I believed that Tomàs would change his mind. He would come back, and like a good friend, I would return him what was his.
“Around this time I married Catarina, a woman five years older than me, who had a reputation for virtue, although the virtuous women of the Flats were rarely paid that compliment. But she was. Thin-ish, prim-ish, regular of feature, but with a severe eye, I never understood why she decided I was destined to be her husband. It could have been simply the lack of options. Her father had been a forty-niner who was tamed by a señorita of the Flats, and that probably accounted for her puritanical streak. She seemed a well too dry to tempt very many men to water there. Catarina invited me to sit down in her tiny drawing room in her small house, as close to the town proper of Solvidado as my people dare come, and after a conversation about the weather, stewed prunes, and transubstantiation, she declared that we would get married, of course.
“I could have objected, but no woman had ever wanted me so definitively as to propose marriage on the first interview, so I agreed. I did ask Catarina once why she had chosen me, and she said that I was an honest enough man—almost the same words Tomàs had used.
“The thing about Catarina was although she possessed only a very small sense of humor, in every other regard, she was a fine woman. And she was as fertile as the Garden of Eden. How her thin body manufactured so many children seemed a miracle of nature, yet it did, every year for fourteen years.” The warmth of Jacinto’s smile leaped the chasm between the spiritual and physical worlds.
“I began to feel that if I breathed on her too heavily she would become pregnant. I had the same problem now as all the other men with families. Solvidado was about dead, and I had a multiplying number of mouths to feed. Also, I couldn’t stop seeing ghosts of those who had died or left. Even the remaining citizens had a furtive ghost-like air. There were perhaps forty of us in the Flats, forty of us in Solvidado proper, plus Madeleine Boller with her nurse and a few straggling farmers on the outskirts and three or four poor fishermen families—that was all.
“Seventeen years passed. My daughters started to nag me about thei
r poor prospects of finding eligible and willing bachelors. I was sorely tempted to move, using Tomàs’s gold to buy a business or land. Nobody would be the wiser. Yet, I knew that if my family left, Solvidado would die completely, and I had loved the town as you can only love a place that welcomed you from your first day as home.
“Tomàs had called me an honest man, so had Catarina, who had no idea I actually knew where the treasure was buried. So the question became: what would an honest man do, and not get himself or others in trouble? When Franklin returned for a visit, very old, holding himself upright by strength of willpower, we discussed the matter.” Jacinto seemed about to say something else as he edged towards the secret, but then shrugged his shoulders and fell silent.
“April thinks that a man at the museum is the honest man,” Philip offered her answer to the riddle.
“No, I’m the honest man like I said. Gus was born fifty years too late to have anything to do with the treasure.”
Philip had a vague sense of having been cheated. “So now I must give up something of equal value to find out where the treasure is. It hardly seems much of a bargain to me.”
“Whatever you would give up to get the treasure is its value,” Jacinto said, not exactly clarifying the issue.
“And what do you mean by that, dammit?” Philip demanded.
“Maybe it’s a personal sacrifice.”
“What? Dedicate my life to the poor? Run an orphanage in the Congo? Become a saint and pray for everybody all the time?”
“None of those seem bad options to me. It was so long ago when I gave those conditions to Gaspar, I don’t recall exactly what I had in mind.”
Philip was fed up. He was going to make this fat ghost answer. “You claim you were an honest man?”
“Yes.”
“Then be honest about what an honest man does with stolen property?”