“But you don’t know.”
“Nope. You could call Kayak Jim Jordan at the Grand Hotel Boblo; think he’ll be running the adventure-school part. Some kind of Outward Bound for—”
“Kids with issues, right. Like your Flyers.”
I nod. “Maybe I heard something like that.”
Jon stares. “And your friends? Susie Devereux and Anne Bonny?”
I think about that before I answer. Anne died in the way she would’ve wanted to go. Same for Susie. Part of me thinks Susie allowed the Gryphon’s people to grab her in Chicago; that at some point she’d decided the money wasn’t gonna do it for her. She was willing to buy a ticket to hell just to get close enough to kill him. I think I kinda knew after she finished with the suicide vest before we went to the crater to do the O.K. Corral, when she cut her friends’ names into her arms.
Exhale.
I look at my bandaged palm and the carving that isn’t there anymore. “Well, Jon, the Witches of Eastwick would be the story, wouldn’t they?”
Epilogue
Bill Owens
Summer 2012
Inside Johnny’s IceHouse, Coach Kenny Rzepecki stands straighter with his new hip. Outside on West Madison Street is a new yellow Hummer that Kenny can now get in and out of with no trouble. When his ride’s not parked here, it’s at his new house in Park Ridge. Kenny smiles more, possibly because he and Patty Prom-Night now have a curvy forty-five-year-old assistant who knows fuck-all about hockey but clearly a whole bunch about making Kenny happy. Kenny’s odd for a rich middle-aged white guy, working the same hours he worked when he was a poor middle-aged white guy. He’s his father’s son, a man who a number of us in the city owe a lot.
Kenny’s rich because he’s my new partner in the hockey team previously known as Grossfeld’s Flyers. Our team now has twenty-two players, twelve Americans, ten Haitians, two of them HIV-positive. We have a team doctor and a team psychologist and a pit-bull lawyer on full retainer.
As is happens, Down syndrome kids are good mentors for Haitian kids who’ve never met civilization. Or hockey. Or cars, sky, endless white people, TV, et cetera. The Flyers are good mentors because they don’t freak out as easily as civilians who have Western expectations of the people they deal with. The ethereal combination of ice, safety, and Flyers is a work in progress for the Haitians. The Flyers, on the other hand, are living like rock stars compared to our pre–Witches of Eastwick adventure, and they know it. Our goalie, Lisa “The Wall” Saunders, high-fives all twenty-two Flyers before and after each practice, grinning and overpronouncing our team motto from kissing distance into every face:
“We sail together; we finish together.”
Grossfeld’s Flyers have been renamed the Valkyrie Flyers. They have their own clubhouse adjacent to the grounds at Hawthorne Race Course, which is next door to the ghost of Sportsman’s and six miles from Johnny’s IceHouse. On the walls we have a life-size photo of the Witches of Eastwick—the rugby shot of Susie, Siri, and Anne. We also have the Mary Read–Anne Bonny painting from the Sazerac Bar in Port Royal. We have our own team bus and a pontoon-deck boat that we dock a block away on the Sanitary and Ship Canal, known to some as the Chicago River. Every Saturday after practice we sail the river with Anne Bonny’s flag from the Sazerac Bar flying from the masthead. Patty Prom-Night will soon have her captain’s license. She says we aspire to a bigger boat.
The Flyers have a skybox for the Blackhawks home games and once a year, a full-uniform, pre-game parade. In the spring, we have a lifetime reservation at the Grand Hotel Boblo in Rum Cay, beachfront bungalows for Bobby Little and Kayak Jim’s Burning Man festival held there every May. The Flyers wear their road jerseys. On the wall above the hotel bar is the last photo ever taken of Susie Devereux and Anne Bonny, taken at Lake Arenal in Costa Rica on September 9, 2009. The photo isn’t signed.
***
Me, I’ve been writing poems and songs, publishing them on the internet. Odd, huh? Given that I have no more talent for either form than Eddie O’Hare did. Most afternoons I come to a Chicago cemetery and write for an hour or two, my back leaned against the four-person mausoleum I built next to my brother Mike’s grave.
Carved above the mausoleum’s door is: “PENDELANE.” Inside, visible through the gated door and above the grave vaults, is a map of the Corazón Santo and “HELL HATH NO FURY.” Under that are the names “Susie Devereux, Anne Cormac Bonny, Florent Dusson-Siri, and Tafat Pendelane.”
Their mausoleum’s nice—my construction company still does good work even with Lisa Reins running it—but this mausoleum’s not a necropolis monument. After a lot of thought about Tania Hahn’s “monument” comment, no structure I could conjure felt like it would be sufficiently Mount Rushmore. Then, listening to Kenny Herbert do songs off the Beatles’ Abbey Road album while I did my rehab, it came to me—Anne’s whole “Paul is dead; let’s quit school to figure it out,” epic-Beatles cryptogram from 1969:
Susie and Anne’s Mount Rushmore should be a treasure hunt.
Their mausoleum is a clue.
It fits somewhere in an intricate series of clues to an already hidden cache of gold bullion; bought with coins the four women and their friends died finding.
Eight years from today, on September 20, 2020, a blind trust based in Queen’s Ferry, Scotland, will announce to the treasure world that the Capone gold was found on September 9, 2009, on a small uninhabited atoll in the Corazón Santo. The announcement will say that the opening clue to the gold’s current location is in a Kenny Herbert song about the “Bargain” and its “pirates.”
However long the treasure hunt lasts, and whatever publicity it gets, the hunt will shine a light on the “Rotten Bargain”—the endless government/crime/business partnerships that govern our planet—and that all four of the girls were born to and died living.
But more important—to me at least—the hunt and its eventual treasure, and the legends that will surround both forever, will be a lasting monument to four women who took turns rescuing me, who walked it like they talked it; who, when the final bell tolled, probably were the Valkyries of Norse legend, the angels of the battlefield who appear out of the smoke and fire to pick who lives and who dies.
In many ways the Valkyries were, and are, the balance, the karma police when the pendulum has swung too far. And given mankind’s endless tryst with the Bargain, it’s even money that in one form or another, all four women are together somewhere in the ether, preparing to come back.
Privateer: “A commission granted by a government to make reprisals; to gain reparations for specific offenses in time of peace, or to prey upon the enemy in time of war.”
The Barbancourt Clues
Illustrations: Robert Bucciarelli, RobertBDesign
Acknowledgments
The Book
Bill Owens.
My partner in BAM (Back Alley Maulers), our first street gang. Candy cigarettes rolled into our shirtsleeves, “LOVE” and “HATE” in washable ballpoint on our knuckles, corrective shoes our mothers made us wear, and one block on Central Street we decided was ours.
Billy Thompson.
If you’re gonna race thoroughbreds or borrow money from loan sharks, might as well make it fun.
Kayak Jim Jordan.
Sky pilot every way you can mean that.
Miami Jon Eig.
Love child of Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, and Margo Godfrey-Oberg.
Deena “The Beast” Telley.
She says Susie Devereux knows why, but that I couldn’t say.
THE LIFE
Brian Rodgers.
First in; never out.
Murad Siam.
Zen Prince of the Pirate Cove and Cosmic River.
Bob Bucciarelli.
Co-conspirator. A boy, a guitar, and a paintbrush.
Sharon Bennett.
Editor in Chief.
MacGyver’s Lost Boy.
Eric Meyer.
Anne Cormack Bonny’s Charleston scion.
Simon Lipskar.
The Southern Cross of this voyage, and the others. Believer, confidant, life preserver in the endless twenty-footers.
Easy Ed Stackler.
Best red pen in the business.
Meghan Sailor Harvey.
When the first publisher enters the America’s Cup, she’ll be their captain.
And
My pal, James B. Loef.
Jimmy lived it fearless and fast, and when I was with him, when we were kids and pals and he looked after me, he was as tough and as good a kid as I ever knew.
About the Author
Charlie Newton is a Chicago native, a writer known for a global life on the road and extended MIA absences. When he does publish, Newton’s heart-pounding, gritty, and witty realism has been a starred-review favorite of the critics and a finalist for the Edgar, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, the Macavity, and the International Thriller Writers awards. Newton is the author of Calumet City (Simon & Schuster, 2008), Start Shooting (Doubleday, 2012), and Traitor’s Gate (Thomas & Mercer, 2015).
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