by James Short
They labored hard, yet at the same time, it could be said that a festive mood prevailed. It wasn’t their house, and nobody they liked had ever lived in it, and the nearby houses were too far away to catch the flames, but it was their duty to fight the fire. Duty was duty, and must be done well. The general good fellowship between the Flats and Solvidado proper was egged on first by jokes and laughter. Then the saloon keeper arrived with a keg of beer and a dozen bottles of whiskey. He had probably wanted to set up shop, but the firefighters took this as an act of great generosity, and he good-naturedly played along.
Fearing drunken menfolk and in the spirit of competition with intemperance, the wives, sisters, and daughters gathered the best of what they had on hand—pies and hams and sandwiches and cakes and jugs of buttermilk and fresh berries with cream—and filled their own wagon. Jacinto became the makeshift host passing out the food and drink, mixing the punch, reassuring those fighting the fire a free funeral to whoever died in the battle. Even Barnwell, an old holdover from Kurtz’s gang got into the spirit as much as a person of his temperament could be expected to get into the spirit. After chugging a good portion of a bottle of whiskey, he declared this the happiest day of his life.
The Anglos recruited the church organist who also happened to be a talented fiddler. The Flats, not to be outdone, produced one of their sons whose fingers danced on the strings of a guitar. Some feet found the music irresistible, and if the opportunity came while hefting the buckets, they would execute a dance step or two. So to music the people of Solvidado fought the fire. A fog rolled in, which helped. The wood of the house which had absorbed the moisture of the last dozen nights of fog and mornings of thick dew also retarded the flames.
In the end, most of the house was saved with charring and toasting here and there. Only the parlor where Madeleine Boller had lain in the casket was completely burnt out. Her body was incinerated. Jacinto explained to a not completely incredulous audience that the fire burned so much hotter there than elsewhere because hell had opened up to receive an honored guest—no two honored guests. Sifting through the debris Jacinto claimed to have found two sets of bones. He was an undertaker, so he should know, people thought, although it was strange that only a part of one skull was recovered.
In the excitement and celebration, no one had taken notice of the departure down the road of the woman who had introduced herself when she arrived in town as Madeleine Boller’s blind niece and the woman’s son whose bright black eyes seemed strangely familiar. Nor during the strenuous battle with the fire had they observed a small dinghy being rowed across the bay.
The party lasted until early morning, well after the flames had been quenched. Even the teetotalers hung on—their fondness for the people overruling their disapproval of the bacchanal because they all knew this was a farewell party. The economic momentum created by Herman Boller’s vision, energy, and willingness to log the forest of monumental trees was played out. A living could be scratched from the land with dairy farms and garden farms—a modest living with modest comforts—but that living couldn’t be shared by many. Much of the area of the Flats had sunk to exactly sea level and every year a high tide would carry a few shanties away. More than three-quarters of the population had already left for richer soils and towns with more vim and bustle. Most of those who remained were making plans for their departure.
So the Americans let down their guard enough to cry and hug, and the Flats’ people responded with terms of endearment and respect. Jacinto didn’t join in, not out of natural reserve—he had none of that quality—but because he was distracted by a solution he and Franklin had recently come up with in regards to a problem.
Philip had a visitation of sorts in the middle of the night. Although he was asleep, he could have sworn his eyes were wide open when Jacinto sat down on the bed.
“Remember just because I look like the fellow in the photo, that doesn’t mean I’m not a figment of your imagination. I can’t tell you about the gold until you agree with me on this point.”
“Do I have any choice?” Philip asked, then sighed. “Okay, I agree with you. What else could you be?”
“Good. Now, I’ll tell you about the gold. I spent it.”
“You spent the gold! You spent the gold! Is that what an honest man would do with it? Spend money that didn’t belong to him!”
“That’s right. El Gran Conde died. No other pig would eat the coins. Franklin was uninterested. Tomàs didn’t want to touch it, so I spent it.”
“You had a spree—cars, women, travel.”
“No, I first bought real estate.”
“Oh, that’s a good investment. Real estate, very solid. You must have become very wealthy,” Philip said sarcastically.
“No, the real estate cost about two thousand dollars altogether. However, I bought something else very expensive. I bought futures.”
Philip shook his head. “I took a class on financial contracts. Futures are too risky for those who don’t know what they’re doing so I imagine you lost the money.”
“You misunderstand me. It might be better to say I bought a future.”
“The joke is over. A future is something you get, whether you want or not until you don’t get it, whether you want or not.”
“You can also buy one if you have imagination. This is how I did it. After a fire in the Boller mansion, few people had the heart to stay on. They sold their houses and their land for a song. I bought them out. Then I invited three intelligent young men to come down and look for the treasure. They accepted. They found a small bit of gold I had planted—enough to whet their appetites. Hal, one of the young men stayed and married Maricela, my third daughter, the other eventually married Melinda, my eighth daughter, but they moved to Los Angeles. Hal, my son-in-law, received as a gift from me a store on Main Street with a small comfortable house attached. On my advice, he started selling hardware.
“You see, the story of Tomàs and Penelope and the lost gold hadn’t died out yet. And with the news of a few double eagles being found, other treasure hunters began to arrive. The treasure hunters needed to eat, needed to sleep, liked to smoke and read their newspapers. So merchants began to arrive. Not all the treasure hunters came up empty-handed. I chose carefully those who were successful. I would make friends with each newcomer and learn what he was about and try to figure out the likelihood he would stay. There was a certain type: decent young men, more on the dreamy side, newly married, discontentedly employed, who hadn’t yet found a place to make a home were the best bets.
“Some of the treasure hunters needed wives. If they chose one of my twelve daughters, they got property on Main Street like Hal. They set up businesses and prospered. Still, many took their treasures and moved on. But if they inquired about the cost of a piece of property, they wouldn’t find a better price or terms.
“Young families attracted more young families. If a young couple who want children see a lot of children in a place, they consider that the place might do for them too. Over the years, I used just about every single piece of gold to seed the area. The plan worked, and it made my heart glad to see Solvidado prosper again.
“Do you know that the value of three beachfront houses in the current market is equal or greater than the value of Deering’s gold today? Imagine that! But the gold and the land are not the value really. The value comes from the decent people. Isn’t it obvious that value flows from hearts and hands into the world? It comes from belief and hope. Hope in a future. Take that away and gold is just a pretty rock.”
“You’ve given me the secret, which I must say isn’t completely satisfactory, and I haven’t given anything of equal value in return,” Philip exclaimed.
“Of course you have, you fool. You’ve given your heart.”
Insufficient ID
Before he returned to his uncle, R. T. Middleton had led Aquino into the station without handcuffs because he was tired of seeing his prisoner practice slipping his hands into and out of them. When Aquino e
mptied the contents of his pocket, the thirty-five cents in change, the handkerchief and a candy wrapper were duly noted. Aquino told the desk clerk he was truly sorry about the absence of any form of identification. The desk clerk would just have to take his word as to the veracity of the data. No, Aquino insisted, he didn’t have a last name or a first name depending on how you looked at it—just Aquino.
“Father Perkins or Father Hornsby?” Detective Middleton suggested.
Well, he was sort of right and sort of wrong, they did exist and they didn’t, but that was a complicated story. Date of birth: forty-eight years ago on May eighth in a vacated elephant stall of the Moscow circus. His mother complained that even at birth he had too large an opinion of himself. Couldn’t the clerk see the color of his eyes? His height was five three and a quarter, weight 129. Married? Well, he had been three times, and would still be if dear Carina hadn’t died taking his heart with her. No, he still only had one name. He had to mention his two children of which he was inordinately proud—a daughter who performed underwater ballet in an aquatic park in Florida, and his son, who was trying to record the language of the last survivors of a tribe of cannibals in the highlands of New Guinea. Formalities rather unsatisfactorily concluded, Aquino was given the opportunity for a phone call.
“No thank you; I waive my right. Maybe I can make a call for another guest of this fine jail who might need to reach a friend.”
A portion of the mob, now in that unhappy condition between drunkenness and sobriety, had made it into the holding tank. The shiny steel bars, the cold brick walls, the toilet in the corner, the fat guard whose slitted eyes made it impossible to tell whether he was asleep or awake all added to the depressing atmosphere.
“And who do you happen to be?” a tattooed man in a biker jacket asked Aquino.
“I’m the kidnapper, the man who was with the girl you were chasing half the night,” Aquino announced to his approximately twenty fellow prisoners. There wasn’t a face in the holding tank that didn’t express either misery or annoyance or outright hostility.
“No, you weren’t.” A college student, very young and still quite slushed, thrust his face at Aquino. “I got a good look at the kidnapper. He wasn’t as old as you.”
“You never got near me,” Aquino replied.
Then everybody suddenly had an opinion: “You were bigger!” “Where’s the girl?” “What a stupid thing to claim.” “If you are him, then we should beat the crap out of you because we’re here because of you.”
They would have gone on with their expressions of anger and their threats, which might have escalated into violence, had it not been interrupted by the voice of authority from an unexpected quarter. The voice of authority turned out to be a frequent occupant of the holding tank. He was an alcoholic whose wife wouldn’t allow home unless it was very cold or rainy. He often was found asleep on the beach. This harmless, hopeless soul was never arrested for vagrancy. He was, however, often brought in on charges of disturbing the peace. The complaint against him was always the same—yelling drunken obscenities at a statue of a mermaid. Eying Aquino with a knowing eye, the man said, “I’ve seen you before. Yes, I have.”
“Where?”
“Here, of course. Yes, here. You can’t fool me. Nobody can fool me. You wore glasses last time. You were fatter. You wore a suit. You asked me a lot of questions. Why were you asking me questions? Yes, you were the County Prison Inspector. That’s it!”
Now this opinion was contested by an equal voice of authority. A friend of officer Dougal, a fellow dart enthusiast at the West Shore Pub who had seen the man in black and the girl in nothing discernible pass by exclaimed, “He’s no prison inspector. He’s telling the truth. I was right next to the window—as close to him as I am to that fat guard over there. So we got him. He’s the reason we are in this mess. Now that we finally got him, we should teach him a lesson about kidnapping naked girls. The guard hasn’t moved in two hours. He is sound asleep, and an atomic bomb won’t wake him up. So, Mr. Kidnapper, how are you going to escape us now?”
“How am I going to escape?” Aquino considered, rubbing his chin. “Good question. Watch me carefully.” He went over to the toilet, flushed it and began to scratch at the seal around the base. His slim long fingers dug deep into soft caulking and after a minute extracted a key. He held it up.
“You see the advantage of being a prison inspector,” Aquino explained going to the barred door and in front of his amazed audience opened it and stepped out. Then he closed and locked the door. The fat guard let out a snore to confirm his unconscious status. Aquino threw the key through the bars, and it plopped neatly into the toilet. The noise of the scramble brought down the desk clerk and a very tired Officer Dougal. The guard woke up and yelled at the prisoners to shut up. The drunk and the biker did observe Aquino slip out as the officers rushed in, but nobody else did.
It had been a rough morning for Dory, but now as she sat beneath the awning with her friend, Father Perkins, the pain and the humiliating loss of control of her physical functions seemed a century away. She had taught herself to become a connoisseur of smells, and the cool breeze had gathered from the ocean and the flowering cliffs a particularly delicious bouquet.
Father Perkins smiled the knowing smile she hated. “If an honest man couldn’t return the gold to its rightful owner, he would give it to charity. You figured that out when Augustus Thornton visited you.”
Dory wriggled in her chair, hardly containing her joy. “No!” She cried triumphantly. “You haven’t guessed it. Besides I didn’t like the man. He was too nice.”
“I don’t believe you really know what happened to the treasure,” Aquino asserted.
“A friend doesn’t accuse another friend of lying. Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t bring that woman. Was she your mistress?”
“I’m a priest.”
“So…”
Aquino sighed. “I would have like to lay the treasure at your feet, as a friend you know, just to prove it could be done.”
Dory shook her head. “I don’t see how anybody could be my friend. I’m not good. I’m not smart. I’m definitely not kind.”
“You’re brave; you’re a fighter, and you care so much that you can’t help making other people care.”
“I’m not a liar.” Dory slowly opened her hand showing a small gold coin.
“Where?” Aquino’s mouth opened a fraction, which, Dory knew, was as much astonishment her friend ever allowed himself to show.
“My grandfather moved here with his family after finding a coin like this. My other grandfather found two coins in a completely different place. It didn’t make sense that Penelope and Tom rode by both of those places when they were running away, so somebody must have put the gold in both places. They both bought land from a man named Jacinto. So he planted the gold to sell the land.”
“He must have made a killing selling property.”
“I don’t know. My grandfather always joked that he bought the land from an undertaker for less than the price of a burial plot. I think Jacinto just didn’t want his town to die.”
“How did you get that coin?” Aquino took gently Dory’s thin open hand and drew it towards him for a better look.
Dory shivered remembering the strange event. “When I saw the wagon go over the cliff, I also saw a fat man pointing to a spot. I don’t know who he was but when my parents took me there, I dug beneath the half-exposed root of the tree where I thought he had pointed and found it.”
Aquino reached out for the coin, eager to ascertain its reality.
Dory shut her hand. “No, not even you can touch it. It’s my hope.”
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