Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  Angus had thus far managed to thwart Dinkle, citing a container ship that ran aground in 1927 after a storm temporarily knocked out power to the revolving searchlight and three times convincing old friends still active as ship’s captains to register concerns about the Tesoro coastline with the Bureau of Lighthouses. After years of effort Dinkle had stopped trying, apparently willing to see which of them would die first, but the dispute still rankled both men enough to make them hate each other. “He ain’t noothin’ but loocky sperm,” Angus often opined, making clear how little he thought of those whose affluence was a result of their fathers’ perspiration.

  Angus had a right to speak his mind on such things. He had been fending for himself since the age of fifteen after he went to sea to escape the fire-and-brimstone disapproval of his father, an elder in the Presbyterian church of Inverness, Scotland. “I figgered there was nae chance for me to be one of the Elect and get to Heaven and so I set sail to raise some hell,” Angus claimed. He’d appeared in Tesoro around twenty-five years earlier, his face pickled into dusky wrinkles by years of sea spray. He was small, sinewy, weather-beaten, and profane with a badly twisted leg—his foot pointed west when Angus was headed north—the result of a losing tussle with a cargo net in the port of Manila in 1905. Angus wanted to believe Dinkle had been handed his fortune, but Miss Lizzie knew otherwise. She’d known the old man for years and was one of the few in town who called him by his first name.

  “Cyrus wasn’t always walled up at his estate,” she told folks. “He was married when he first arrived. His wife and my mother were friends and the Dinkles were at our house for dinner more than a few times. He didn’t inherit a dime. He was a trader in the Indian Territories and made his money in the black market. Gun-running, too. My father knew all about it. Papa said Cyrus had already made a fortune by the time he arrived in town. He owns land all over…California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. Probably other places, too.”

  Miss Lizzie had been merely a child when the former Indian Territories trader arrived, but well remembered a fellow who looked nothing like the mostly bald, paunchy Dinkle I knew, his lips dusky, his hands liver-spotted, a slight, fixed curl to his back giving him both the personality and body habitus of a vulture. “He was a young, fit man with lots of dark hair and a moustache,” Miss Lizzie recalled. “Mrs. Dinkle was very pretty. She was obviously afraid of her husband…Only lasted about two years in Tesoro. After she ran off, Cyrus hired his man.”

  No one knew why Dinkle settled in Tesoro. The sea, maybe. He didn’t sail, but C. Herbert Judson described the old man as a fixture at the bay window of his study during their rare appointments. “He stares at the horizon as if waiting for a ship to appear,” Mr. Judson once told Miss Lizzie when I was close enough to hear. Upon arrival in our little village, Dinkle had rented what was the largest house in town at the time; then he acquired one hundred acres bordering the ocean and immediately begun construction on a compound. “Papa was an architect and worked on all the buildings,” Miss Lizzie claimed, the Dinkle estate eventually including four edifices: the main house, a guesthouse, a servants’ barracks, and a stable that now served as a garage. Except for the main house and the garage, the buildings had long been empty. The garage included an upstairs apartment, occupied by Dinkle’s man, and housed one car—a long, elegant Duesenberg that was fired up every week or so when Dinkle needed to make a trip to San Francisco.

  Dinkle had three maids to keep the empty house spotless, a small army of gardeners to manicure the deserted grounds, and a cook to prepare meals. Despite the spacious servant’s quarters, none were in residence, leaving Dinkle’s man—a tall, cadaverous fellow with an accent—as the only live-in staff member. Rumors surrounded the mysterious manservant who simultaneously occupied the roles of butler, valet, and chauffeur. “He was a duke or some such in one of them European principalities,” some folks said. “He was a gangster in Chicago. He worked for Al Capone,” others claimed. A spooky creature about thirty years younger than his nearly eighty-year-old employer, Dinkle’s man had a habit of popping up at Fiona Littleleaf’s mercantile as if materializing from thin air, a phantasmagorical event unnerving more than one tourist about to shell out a nickel for a Coca-Cola or a box of Milk Duds. “Mister Dinkle’s mail, please,” he’d request in an eerie drone. Afterward, he’d offer an equally sonorous, “Thank you,” before departing without another word. Most kids in town were terrified of him, quite certain he was exactly the sort of ghoul his appearance suggested. I wasn’t. I had once seen him steam the glass on the window of Fiona’s mercantile with his breath, afterward drawing a heart in the condensation. Only a man with a soul would do such a thing.

  After our first town meeting, C. Herbert Judson lost a coin flip with Miss Lizzie and was given the job of informing Dinkle about his exclusion from the town ambergris collective. Mr. Judson had been on the estate more than once as he occasionally prepared a legal document for the old man. Still, he didn’t relish the task, later telling us that Dinkle had initially offered no response when apprised of the news, instead moving to the liquor cabinet in his study where he poured exactly one finger of scotch into each of a pair of tumblers.

  “One finger before lunch can lead to inspiration. Two is recreational,” he’d said, offering one of the tumblers to Mr. Judson. “Three is usually celebratory for me…and commiserative for my competitors.”

  According to Mr. Judson, Dinkle next went to his study’s huge bay window where his gaze drifted out to distant whitecaps—innocuous forerunners to the tall, fierce waves crashing onto the beach at high tide. Judson’s news wasn’t a surprise to the old gunrunner. The estate’s servants were incorrigible tongue-waggers and Dinkle routinely eavesdropped when they took their lunch in the kitchen in order to keep abreast of the goings-on in the village. Their account of my discovery and its worth had provoked skepticism at first, but after retiring to his study to read about ambergris in one of the thick volumes of his Encyclopedia Britannica, it seemed to the former Indian Territories trader that there may, indeed, be a fortune tantalizingly within reach if a man were well-experienced in the art of slipping his hand into someone else’s pocket. This explains why Mr. Judson’s uneasily offered disclosure that Dinkle would not share in the town’s new wealth did not anger the old man as our town lawyer had expected; rather, it provided welcome corroboration that booty was within reach, causing Dinkle to luxuriate in a larcenous tingle that was both familiar and comforting.

  Years in the Indian Territories had taught Dinkle to snatch up an opportunity as ruthlessly as a coyote makes off with a stray cat. A decision like mine—to simply toss away most of a rightfully acquired fortune—was a concept as foreign to him as his man’s mysterious heritage. “This O’Halloran boy…you say he came up with the idea to give it away on his own?” he posed to Mr. Judson.

  “He’s that kind of boy,” Mr. Judson said.

  “Maybe,” Dinkle replied. “In my experience, no one is that generous.”

  After Mr. Judson left, Dinkle remained at the window, sipping his scotch as waves coursed onto the beach and then just as quickly receded. As always, the distant, flat horizon recalled his years in the Indian Territories where a man could ride for days without seeing a drop of water. He had promised his wife that water would be visible on a whim when they moved to California—a vow he’d kept—and yet she’d left him anyway, no amount of either water or money enough to keep her in his bed for even one more night. He didn’t miss her. The woman was beautiful but complained incessantly. Dinkle had once owned a couple of Indian squaws in the Territories and sometimes wished he’d kept one. “They do what they’re told and keep their mouths shut,” he occasionally professed to his man, the tall valet-chauffeur invariably offering no response as he well knew that no response was exactly what his employer required of him.

  Dinkle moved from the window to the liquor cabinet. He poured a second finger of scotch and then sat at his massive desk where he po
ndered for a time, one finger tapping the tip of his nose like the pendulum of a metronome. When he was done thinking, a broad smile had replaced his customary scowl and he allowed himself another finger of scotch.

  Chapter Seven:

  The second town meeting

  A week after I discovered the ambergris on the beach a notice was posted to the announcement board of the town hall, on the public kiosk in Fremont Park, and inside the front window of Fiona Littleleaf’s mercantile.

  CITIZENS OF TESORO

  A meeting will be held at the town hall on the evening of June 9 at 7:00 p.m. Please be on time.

  Agenda

  I. Election of moderator

  II. Approval of minutes

  III. An offer from Mr. Cyrus Dinkle

  Item III provoked a torrent of gossip as Dinkle and “offer” had rigorously kept separate houses in the past.

  “What do you suppose he’s up to?” I asked Fiona. I was at her mercantile where I often hung out, hoping she might stop stocking shelves or sorting mail or scribbling in her account book long enough give me a sign that we would one day become husband and wife. Fiona Littleleaf was the prettiest woman in Tesoro—the prettiest in California in my estimation—a wheat-haired beauty with coltish eyes. I thought her perfect—as clever as she was beautiful, unafraid to argue with the devil, and able to pound a nail straighter than a master carpenter. We shared a history of sorts, both of us fatherless, our mothers infirm. Fiona’s father had been killed in the Great War, her mother lost to the flu pandemic of 1918. After her parents died, the six-year-old little girl had been adopted by spinsters Rosie and Roxy Littleleaf, a pair she called aunts even though they were actually cousins.

  Precociously capable, the little girl had a flair for business and was running the mercantile and postal exchange by the time she was fifteen, something her aunts welcomed. The general store was part of their inheritance from their father and they had already come close to sinking it several times before their niece took over. “I love them dearly, but they’re better at yarn selection than balance sheets,” Fiona once told me. Rosie and Roxy made Fiona a full partner shortly after the young woman graduated from high school and the new co-owner immediately added the Kittiwake Inn next door to their little empire. It, too, was profitable and Fiona Littleleaf and her adoptive aunts were well on their way to moving into the sparse, upper financial echelon of Tesoro’s families when the stock market crashed. Tourism dried up for a time, but Fiona had already set aside enough money to keep them afloat, and now after almost five years, the tourists were trickling back into town.

  In 1934, Fiona Littleleaf was twelve years my senior and undoubtedly loved me in the same way an aunt loves a nephew. I had loftier intentions as I was merely ten and believed I would eventually get women figured out. I’m ninety-one now and still haven’t, although I’ve learned that baffling men is part of a woman’s charm. We baffle them, too, although I suspect they are more often annoyed than baffled.

  Fiona was reorganizing bolts of fabric when I asked her to speculate on Dinkle’s intentions. Of course, I already knew her answer. An offer of any sort from Cyrus Dinkle was uncharacteristically magnanimous, given that he was a man legendarily indisposed to magnanimity.

  “I don’t know what he has in mind, Connor,” Fiona said, “but there will be fine print on it, that much I’ll guarantee.” She moved a bolt of thin cotton material boasting a gaudy floral pattern from one open compartment to another. The first cubicle had seemed adequate to me, the entire transaction pointless. However, Fiona accomplished it with such grace, indeed, was so assured that I found myself utterly captivated. She had a way of moving that seemed at once purposeful and unpretentious—a woman who both knew the effect she had on men and yet seemed not to know it at all. Once I was far enough clear of adolescence to think straight, I learned to attribute such an affect to confidence. As a boy, however, it was simply hypnotic. She looked at me and fashioned a quizzical expression.

  “That’s quite a face. Penny for your thoughts?” she asked.

  About a year earlier I had seen a moving picture in San Rafael starring Frenchman Maurice Chevalier. It depicted a fellow in love who burst into song or spouted poetry whenever confronted by the woman he loved. Ma and Miss Lizzie took my brother and me to see it and thought Chevalier’s reaction not only entertaining but entirely plausible. Alex and I thought the whole premise silly. We giggled throughout the picture with Miss Lizzie occasionally aiming a narrow eye our way to shush us. However, in the mercantile that morning I was a year older. With Fiona waiting for an answer to her question—her perfect face offering an inquiring expression, a strand of honeyed hair falling over one eye—I felt suddenly and inexplicably musical. Unfortunately, I lacked Chevalier’s talent for verse or staying on key.

  “Just thinking about the meeting tonight,” I answered, disappointed to provide nothing more than a one-note response with no rhyme. Nevertheless, this seemed to satisfy her as well it should have. Merely a week had passed since the first town meeting to discuss the ambergris. A second gathering so soon was unprecedented and lent the sort of stature to the get-together typically reserved for holidays like the Fourth of July. The twilight start time added to the excitement; indeed, a meeting convened in the evening was a festive affair, often preceded by a picnic in Fremont Park—the cuisine leaning toward fried sand dabs, potato salad, and corn on the cob. During an evening meeting, children were turned loose to chase fireflies or play tag in the park, while across the street, the adults filled every seat in the assembly room of the town hall for sessions sure to include entertaining arguments, more than a few fellows emboldened by a nip or two after dinner. Should they fail to deliver, there was always Milton Garwood’s thin skin and Angus MacCallum’s habit of rubbing it thinner whenever he could.

  Such displays of temper might have gone from theater to back alley had C. Herbert Judson not routinely intervened. He had a talent for shifting moods to the matters at hand, typically offering a joke or a run of vocabulary words that had us later scouring a dictionary. His calm voice and Mr. Johns’s firm grasp of Robert’s Rules of Order always managed to get the meeting back on the rails. Indeed, folks were a little disappointed each time Mr. Johns gaveled the proceedings to a close, dawdling outside the town hall or on the walk home as if reluctant to let the curtain fall on the evening’s theatrics. If the meeting took place on a warm summer night, more than a few lounged on porch swings or in back yards until close to the scandalous hour of ten-thirty, drinking iced tea while discussing how Mr. Johns was a fine fellow and all, but you could be damned sure things would be run differently if they were in charge.

  Activities started early for the second town meeting and Fremont Park was packed by five o’clock. I was there with Ma and Alex, sharing fried halibut, macaroni salad, and watermelon slices with Miss Lizzie and Fiona. My mother was more than a week into drinking Miss Lizzie’s latest concoction and was uncommonly steady, joining Miss Lizzie and Fiona in a monumentally boring discussion of how much they all admired First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This left Alex and I no choice but to prowl about with our pals, playing tag or hanging out with Tuck Garwood and his junior high buddies, snickering as they told each other dirty jokes or lied about which base they’d gotten to with their girlfriends. We returned to retrieve Ma a little before seven o’clock.

  “Stay in the park until I come back for you,” I instructed my brother. “And don’t go to the beach. I mean it.”

  “I want to come to the meeting,” Alex said.

  This was a surprise. I was fascinated by the little dramas that played out at a typical town meeting, but things like Milton Garwood’s griping or Coach Wally Buford’s bloviating had always seemed pointless to Alex.

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s the same old stuff. You’ll hate it.”

  “I want to go.”

  I was about to give Alex a pinch when Ma butted in. “There’s n
o reason he can’t go, Connor,” she said.

  I shot her the sort of look parents throw at each other when they disagree about what to do with their kid.

  “There isn’t,” Ma reiterated, her voice soft.

  I sometimes argued with my mother when she overruled me about Alex. I figured I should have a say in what he did since Ma could be pretty crazy at times and I was the one who would have to get him out of the trouble she allowed him to get into. Besides, like most men, I hated to back down, even though this time Ma’s eyes were clear, her voice was steady, and I was wrong.

  “I just think—”

  “There isn’t,” Ma interrupted.

  “He’ll be bored, Ma.”

  My little brother took one of Ma’s hands. “You don’t know what I’ll be,” he said.

  I glared at him but offered no rebuttal, since there really was no reason he couldn’t go other than my damned stubbornness. Ma and Alex were right and we all knew it.

  “Fine,” I muttered.

  I took Ma’s other hand and we led her across the street to the town hall. Inside the assembly room the usual leadership group was already seated at the front: Roger Johns the Banker, C. Herbert Judson the Lawyer, Miss Lizzie Fryberg, Fiona Littleleaf, James Throckmorton, and Coach Wally Buford. Cyrus Dinkle sat at the end of their row of chairs with his man standing a few steps away, the tall, thin fellow’s expression a lugubrious blend of somnambulist and basset hound.

  Ma, Alex, and I took seats in the back row and watched Coach Wally Buford make his regular pitch for the moderator’s gavel. He finished up by nominating himself, his name uncharacteristically making it to the ballot when Milton Garwood impulsively seconded the nomination because Angus MacCallum told him he couldn’t. Of course, Angus just wanted to stir things up and voted for Roger Johns like everyone else. Moderator Johns then asked if anyone proposed corrections to the minutes of the previous meeting. Milton Garwood, a staunch Catholic with six children and thirty-seven grandchildren, believed a request for corrections to the minutes was tantamount to a referendum on the ambergris distribution plan. He asked for another vote in favor of the per person allotment supported by his church.