by David Downie
“It’s coq au vin night,” Beverley announced, “and I baked some soda bread, too. No booze with the kid at the table. You can translate for Taz if you feel like it.”
“He’ll enjoy it more if I don’t.”
Taz raised his fork. “Cocoa van?” He poked at the mound on his plate, his nose flaring and eyelashes batting, a suspicious camel. “It’s like chicken, in some kind of dark, coconut, or chocolate sauce, right? It smells, like, kind of funny, almost like bubble gum.” He dipped his bread in and tasted it.
“Right and wrong,” Beverley said. “No bubble gum, and watch the ‘likes.’”
“Nothing icky in it, right?”
“Right. Unless you think bacon is icky.”
“Icky?” James asked. “Kids still say ‘icky’?”
“Bacon’s not icky,” Taz said, ignoring him.
“And pearl onions?”
“Onions are okay.”
“And wine?”
“I don’t like wine, it, like, burns my throat.”
“That’s the alcohol,” Beverley said, “when you cook it, the alcohol evaporates, and it doesn’t burn your throat.”
“Right.” Taz paused and ate a forkful. “Pretty good,” he said. “Kind of like something we had in the cafeteria once with macaroni. I mean, this is better and all, but it kind of reminds me, that’s all. So, why don’t people just, like, evaporate the alcohol in wine before they drink it, so it won’t burn their throat?”
Beverley and James glanced at each other.
“You’ve got a million-dollar idea there,” Beverley said. “It’s called kosher wine, it’s pasteurized. My second husband, Solomon, was a lapsed Jew, but he still drank the stuff. Tasted like grape juice. Talk about icky.”
“I like grape juice,” Taz said.
“So do I,” James said, coming to the rescue. “Maybe we’re Jewish. My wife was Jewish, lapsed, as Beverley puts it, and ethnically half American and half Japanese. But she didn’t go in for kosher wine.”
“Well I’ll be,” Beverley put in, “I thought I’d heard of every possible combo, and that explains your taking off your boots.”
“Maybe we are Jewish,” Taz agreed. “Grandma says we’re all part Jewish anyway.”
“She’s right at least metaphorically,” Beverley cut in. “We’re all mixed up, even those of us with pearly complexions or skin as black as that sauce. We’re all a coq au vin of genetic material, a real potpourri.”
Taz stopped chewing. “Is that another French recipe?”
“Google it,” Beverley said, handing him his smartphone. “You’ve got one minute. That’s what your infernal toy is good for, looking up words and learning useful things. Check ‘recuse’ and ‘potpourri’ and ‘blue moon’ while you’re at it. I’m counting.”
Transformed, Taz batted several text messages back and forth in a matter of seconds, then smiled as he hit the Internet and struck gold. “A mixture of dried petals and spices placed in a bowl to perfume a room,” he read aloud, crumpling his face.
“Keep going,” Beverley said.
“A mixture or medley of things,” Taz added.
“That’s it,” she said.
“Always check the second meaning,” James suggested, “or the third or the fourth. And don’t forget to check the etymology.”
“The what?”
“The origin.”
“Why not say so?”
“Scroll down, Taz,” Beverley said. “Go on. Read where it says ‘origin.’”
Stroking and tapping, Taz read, “Early seventeenth century, denoting a stew made of different kinds of meat: from French, literally ‘rotten pot.’” He twisted his rubbery face. “Rotten pot? That’s gross, why do the French eat rotten pots?”
“We’re all rotten pots waiting to happen.” Beverley laughed.
“I’m already happening,” James added. “That saw did me in.”
“Old people are gross,” Taz said. “Are you always like that, I mean, Grandma says stuff like that, she never swears, she just, like, says weird things I don’t get, like, ‘enjoy yourself, things’ll get worse,’ it’s so weird.”
Beverley thrust out her hand and snapped her fingers, but Taz had already begun tapping and stroking his screen again. “I need to show James something.” Seconds later he held up the phone. “With the MapIt app, I just made a map of the property. We can add colors and GPS flags and captions if you want.”
Beverley clicked her tongue. From his pocket, James produced a pair of reading glasses, took the phone and admired Taz’s handiwork. “That’s impressive,” he said, handing it back. “But how do you print it out?”
“Why print it out?”
“So that people like us can see it and use it and draw on it and write comments in the margin and get bloodstains on it, you know.”
Taz smiled. “Okay, I can download it and send it as an attachment, and Beverley can print it out, and then you can go back to the Stone Age.”
“Great,” James said. “Then we’ll compare.”
Taz caressed and tapped his screen, then pretended to hand the phone to Beverley. “I sent it,” he said, jerking the phone back. “Just one more minute . . .”
“I’m counting,” said Beverley. She and James fell silent and watched Taz tickling his phone. “That’s forty-two seconds,” she said.
Taz beamed. “I just got a message, the kit will be here tomorrow by drone, at 1:17 P.M., with a margin of seventeen minutes on either side,” he said.
“Seventeen?” Beverley gasped.
“Seventeen,” Taz confirmed, his face goofier than ever.
“What kit will be here,” she demanded, “and what drone?”
James explained without mentioning the backup cellphone hidden in Taz’s hoodie.
“Finish your dinner,” Beverley commanded, pocketing the phone again, then sticking her hand out a second time. She snapped her fingers and watched Taz dig out and relinquish the secret smartphone. “If you think you can fool the Tater you’d better think again. The chicken is getting cold,” she added.
Taz ate one bite then held his fork up like a baton, beating out time. “If you print out the map for James, we can put our plates back in the microwave and the chicken won’t be cold.”
Beverley glared at him. “Well, just this once,” she said, shuffling to the office. On the way back, she slid the plates one by one into the microwave and dealt them back out.
“This is fabulous,” James said, studying the map, “but let me be the devil’s advocate. What about the pleasure of using a pen or pencil and drawing something with your own hands?” James held the clean, crisp new map in his long, thick, gnarled fingers. “What about the fact that a treasure map on graph paper is unique, it can’t be hacked.”
“Who would want to hack it?”
James raised his eyebrows. “You never know. What if it really was a treasure map and you didn’t want anyone else to have one?”
“My phone is encrypted,” Taz said.
“They could torture you,” Beverley chortled, chewing and swallowing. “It’s back in fashion.”
Taz frowned. “They could torture him, too, and make him tell them where he hid the map, and when they got it, they could scan it and then it wouldn’t be unique. Nothing is unique and why would you want something unique anyway?”
James and Beverley exchanged glances again. Each took a bite. “You’re unique,” James said.
“He sure is,” Beverley said, “even the stud in his tongue is uniquely awful if you ask me.”
“Beverley’s unique, I’m unique,” James added. “Your grandma’s unique, and all the great things in your life are unique, they’re unique experiences, they can’t be scanned and shared.”
Taz pondered, his fork in midair. “But, like, I could be recording and videoing us eating this unique cocoa van, like, and then I could share it with my friends, wouldn’t that be all right?”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Beverley said. “Look at my hair
, the wind has made a mess of it, and you two are unmade beds.”
“Try keeping it a unique experience,” James said, his voice almost a whisper. “Give privacy and uniqueness a try, you might enjoy them.”
“Maybe,” Taz said.
Back in the garden after dinner, with the daylight fading, and the windless air unusually warm, they compared the maps. Taz said if he added a bloodstain to the printed digital map it would be almost as good as James’s inaccurate sketch on graph paper. The way he said it, James was unsure if he was joking.
“My map has a lot more detail,” James protested, “the shack and the shed and the shrubs . . . And this digital map shows a paved road to the beach, where it’s actually a private access road and a wooden staircase.”
Taz studied the digital map and agreed. “If you gave me a few minutes I could, like, fix it and put all that in and more, in scale and color.” He smiled. “Let me take a snap, I’ll work on something tonight at home.”
SEVEN
Wearing a bike helmet with a camera on top and protective pads on his knees and elbows, Taz climbed with his long bony feet onto the projecting pedals of an electric unicycle. Waving goodbye with what looked like hockey gloves, he silently rolled out of the parking lot heading north on the Old Coast Highway. “Watch out for that blind curve,” Beverley shouted at him. When he turned to look back, his seven-foot figure wobbled as it receded into the darkening, brittle landscape of coyote bush, gorse, and scrub, then disappeared altogether around the gooseneck bend in the road.
For an awkward, gangling teenager, Taz seemed to James to be remarkably agile at times. That went with his unconventional, changeable looks and flip-flop character, at turns sunny and somber, introverted and outgoing, serious and silly, mature and childish, vulnerable and self-assured. James stopped himself, displeased by the roll call of opposing abstractions in his head. Taz was a human, a kid, not a concept to be defended or described, he told himself.
Realizing just how little contact he had with the young, James wondered if Taz were typical of Millennials or Gen Zs. He understood why someone might call him a Martian, green hair and spiked tongue or not. There was something alien about his manner, something endearing and unsettling.
“He keeps you guessing,” Beverley said in her stentorian voice from where she stood by the motel office door, the floodlights on in the parking lot and front garden.
“Nice kid,” James commented. She waddled toward him clutching an envelope in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. He removed his gardening gloves and leaned on the shovel he had been using to loosen the soil so he could plant some of the extra cuttings. The sky was a bruised blue, the air cooling rapidly, and the sunset wind picking up.
“It’s thanks to his grandmother,” Beverley explained, handing James the bottle and watching him chug it down. “She is what we used to call a ‘class act.’ My handle for her is Glinda the Good, you know, the witch from The Wizard of Oz. We play cards together once a week with a bunch of other old bags, that’s to say, a group of distinguished seniors like myself. I don’t know how she brought up Taz by herself, but that’s what happens when your grown son is a louse who marries a whacko druggie, dumps a seven-year-old kid on you when you’re struggling to stay afloat solo in your dotage, and then poof, disappears.” She paused. “It all comes out when you play cards, believe me, it’s as cathartic as gardening. You sure you don’t have a favorite suit of cards? No one says you have to like the ace of spades, you are free to prefer the two of clubs, or the eight and nine of that suit. They were Number Three’s favorites.”
“I’m afraid I don’t play cards,” he said, baffled again. Finishing the water then wiping his brow, James took the envelope and slid it into his back pocket. “What’s the story with his mother? People call her the Squaw.”
Beverley said she didn’t know, she assumed the mother had been at least part Native American or Mexican, judging by Taz’s looks, but maybe not, she could have been Pakistani or Burmese or North African or Jamaican for that matter, no one had seen her in Carverville, not even Taz’s grandmother. “It’s one of those all-American stories,” she cackled, diving in. “I heard she was an Indio and died in Montana at some kind of nutty pipeline protest, froze to death like a fish stick, and the son didn’t stick around to thaw her out.”
Beverley continued the sad tale. Returning to town one night after an absence of years, Taz’s father had left the boy in Glinda’s custody, Beverley said, promising he would be back for him one day. Almost a decade had gone by since then and there had been no sign of the louse. “The son had some trouble with the law back when the law was mostly on our side,” Beverley said. “I heard tell a tall, dark, mysterious stranger showed up at Mulligan’s one night a number of years ago and got to boozing and brawling and then left that reputable establishment in the company of someone’s wife. That someone was a long-distance trucker and the wife happened to be the younger sister of someone you met this morning, namely Tom Smithson. A risky business.”
“Not a great idea,” James agreed.
“When he’s not licking himself like a calico tomcat, I call Tom the Smiling Sadist because behind that Doughboy face lies the heart of a vicious moron. It must run in the family, though Tom can’t hold a candle to his uncle. Anyway, the sister, her name is Annie, I believe, no longer lives in these precincts, she hightailed it over the hills to Hazelwood once the ruckus was over and her hubby tossed her out.”
“And the presumed son was never seen or heard from after that night?”
Beverley shook her head, her pearls rattling. “No guarantee he was the son,” she said, “no names attached, and whoever it was he might’ve hitched a ride out of the county the next morning for all I know. It happened before I got here.” She drummed her fingers. “What’s worse,” she added before James could continue his thought, “is the false rumor that went around a few years back. I will repeat it for your benefit, only because you’ll hear it sooner or later if you stick around. It is that the so-called son doesn’t exist, Taz isn’t her grandson but her son, and that she had him down south with a man of color or a Moslem immigrant when she was already past forty.”
Hanging his head, James muttered, “What century are we in?” The mentality clearly had not evolved in Carverville since his youth. But he felt detached from Taz’s tale and unwilling to sink himself into the swamp of prejudice. Raising his eyes to the giant blue gum trees waving in the wind, the sunset glow behind them, he focused on the tangled branches and decided they were talking to each other. They sounded like rushing animals, like birds in flight, or salmon thrashing upstream through the shallows ready to spawn and die. Those were the sounds he loved, the sounds he had missed in the cities where he had spent the last thirty-five years.
“No joke,” Beverley said, unfazed by his silence. “We’re stuck in the nineteenth century.” She waited but James continued to gaze as if mesmerized by the eucalyptus grove at the bottom of the garden.
“The sound and scent of those trees is magical, Beverley, but they should be topped,” he said at last. “Clearing the rose garden could take a while, too,” he added. “Taz can do that now.”
“Yes,” she said. “Taz could probably do that.” She waited with uncharacteristic patience. “What you mean is, if you stick around a few more days, you could help him, and it would all come out better, and he might not cut his legs off or fell a tree on a cottage.”
James shrugged. “I suppose I could,” he said. “No one is expecting me.”
“Well, you’d better stop supposing and pull the blocks out from under your rig. You can park in that lower lot down by my shack.” She began organizing the operation. “You wouldn’t want to park up here in the lot on the highway in front of the office, it’s not private, car doors slamming, people coming and going, drug deals, murder and mayhem, you know.” She paused to eye him. “I did get a couple reservations for the weekend, by the way. The first one is arriving this evening, right about now.”
She waited, watching, but he still said nothing. “First you’ll have to get the gates open and clear some brush off the access road. We can run an extension cord from Sea Breeze for now. Even if no one were to shoot you out there in the public lot, in a couple days the sheriff would make you move on anyway, so you might as well get rolling. No surveillance cameras on my property, and you have a private staircase to Graveyard Beach, I don’t know why they call it that instead of Greenwood Beach, but they do.”
“With seventeen treads on the last flight of that staircase,” James said, eager to avoid the topic of the graveyard. “One day you’ll have to tell me why Holmes was obsessed with the number seventeen.” Taking a deep breath, he stabbed the shovel blade deeper into the ground, relieved not to strike a tombstone, still of two minds about staying. “It won’t take long, a few more days, maybe a week.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “You’re welcome to stay for as long as you want, keep your head low, if you see what I mean, sort out all the private matters that are torturing you. Now, before you say another word, you might want to open that envelope I gave you,” she added.
He felt for it in his pocket. “I hope you’re not trying to pay me for my hard labor,” he joked. “I’d have to pay you for the lunch and dinner and in fact, I owe you money for the shopping.”
Beverley scoffed. “Pay you? I’d never think of it, knowing what I know. It would be an insult to offer a pittance to a personage as distinguished as yourself, Your Honor.” James gave her a startled, dismayed look. With twinkling eyes, she continued, “Here’s a hint, remember The Paper Chase?”
James opened the envelope and inside found a dirty, crumpled sheet of embossed letterhead covered with handwriting. Stapled to it was another crumpled sheet of letterhead, this one photocopied, with his own handwritten notes in the margins. “So that’s where it went,” he muttered. “I thought it blew onto the beach or down the highway. I couldn’t find it and went through the garbage . . .”