Big Maria

by Johnny Shaw

  Ricky only needed to remove one more floorboard to get a good sense of what was below. He felt confident that if he could remove it without the walls falling in on him, then he could dig without any danger.

  If the walls didn’t fall on him.

  Ricky put his hand on the end of the last floorboard. The moment he moved it an inch, he knew it was holding up the walls. The base of the wall was braced against the board. Or at the least, it was a factor in the wall’s stability. He tried to set the board back in place, but the walls started to crack and tumble.

  Ricky dropped the weight belt and swam quickly for the opening in the roof where he had originally entered. The walls fell. It looked like they were moving in slow motion. When he thought he was clear, the top edge of the wall caught his legs. The weight of the wall and force of the water pulled him back into the room. Ricky landed softly in the dirt where he had removed the floorboards. He waited for the rest of the wall. He waited for the impact. He waited. Finally, he opened his eyes.

  He had escaped being crushed. He was unhurt, but his legs were trapped under a section of wall. He could move them slightly, but not enough to wriggle out. The bigger problem was that he was facedown with the cylinder on his back. Like the inverse of an upside-down turtle, he was having trouble reaching behind his body to remove the debris from the back of his legs.

  “Harry? You still there? Harry, you hear me?”

  “Still here, Ricky. What’s up?”

  “Walls fell. Got out, kinda. Then pulled back in. Ain’t hurt, but I’m stuck.”

  “Stuck how? Shut up, Frank. Shut up. I don’t know yet. Tell me what you got, Ricky.”

  “Got some building on my legs. Don’t hurt. Hopefully that ain’t shock. I think I’m okay. Kind of wedged. Everything moved so slow. Pinned is all.”

  “Can you unbury yourself?”

  “I’m trying, but I got to bend my arm behind my back in this weird way.”

  Ricky reached his good arm as best he could behind him. He grabbed a chunk of wall and set it to the side. He reached again and grabbed another chunk.

  “I might got it. I’ll dig as much as I can, then hopefully pull myself out.”

  Ricky was concerned but not panicked. He had some time. He could do this.

  Then he noticed the crack in his mask. It was a visible hairline running vertically along the front.

  “My mask is cracked.”

  “Is water coming in? Ricky, is there water inside?”

  “My face is wet, but I think that’s sweat. I don’t feel water, I don’t think, but it’s a long crack across the front. I can see it. Thought it was in the water, but it’s in my face.”

  “You need to get back up here.”

  “Thanks, Harry. I didn’t know that.”

  Ricky continued to move the debris from his legs. He could move his leg a little, which was a good sign. He tried to use his bad arm, too, but even underwater it was too weak to make a difference. Small handfuls at best.

  He moved one small piece at a time. Slowly and patiently. He just told himself, do the work. It didn’t matter if he was scared. It didn’t matter how he felt about the situation. Feelings never mattered. It was always about the work.

  When he had removed a considerable amount of debris, he reached over his head with both arms. He dug his fingers into the dirt and pulled his body across the ground. He slid a couple of inches forward, some of the debris settling behind him.

  The crack grew on his mask. Or was that his imagination? He thought he felt more dampness on his face. He prayed silently that it was more sweat.

  He dug his fingers deeper into the dirt and pulled. His hand latched around something solid. He got a good grip and pulled himself another foot. It was working. With the new purchase, he dragged himself far enough that he could lift the rest of the wall off his legs by bending them and shaking. One flipper was gone. Harry would have to eat the deposit on that. He laughed out loud. His legs were finally free.

  “Is that a good laugh or a I’ve-gone-crazy laugh?”

  “Little bit of both. I’m out. I’m coming up.”

  He looked at his hands to see what they had latched onto. It was a human femur. Ricky let the leg bone drop from his hand. He watched it drift down and land on top of the rest of the human skeleton directly underneath him. Well, most of a human skeleton.

  The body had no head.

  TWENTY

  The three men stared at the metal box on the deck of the boat. The box wasn’t large, about a foot and a half square. It was wrapped tightly in leather that had constricted to the sides and corners like taut skin. Out of the water and in the heat of the sun, the leather became brittle and peeled back like corn husk. The straps that held the box closed were chipped and frayed, but the metal appeared to have survived intact with no visible holes. The box had rusted shut at the seam of the hinged lid. There was no lock.

  Ricky was still in the wet suit but had removed all the gear. Water dripped from his hair, splashing around his one flipper and bare foot.

  After finding the mostly complete skeleton, it had only been a matter of looking underneath the long-dead body. In fact, when he got a good look at the skeleton, he saw the top of the metal box through Constance’s ribs.

  They continued to look at the box like hounds sussing out a cornered skunk. Excited but cautious. They wanted to get near it but weren’t quite convinced of its harmlessness.

  It hadn’t quite sunk in that they had found what they were looking for. They had done the work, but actually finding it had been closer to fantasy. An object that once only existed in a third-person sixty-year-old rumor now sat in front of them. The potential of its contents was beyond their comprehension.

  Up until that moment, the three of them were all on bad losing streaks. Events in each of their lives had plummeted at terminal velocity. Success had become unrecognizable. Good news practically incomprehensible. For that reason, they had all outwardly prepared themselves for eventual disappointment. Even in the wake of their small victory, they were convinced of defeat.

  “Could be nothing in it,” Harry said.

  “Yeah,” Frank agreed. “Or it could be that it’s all destroyed from the water and age. Been down there a long time.”

  “Or it could be there’s stuff inside, but not nothing that does us no good,” Harry added.

  Ricky remained silent, his eyes locked on the old metal cube.

  Harry gave it a soft kick. It made a hollow thunk, something banging inside it. They all nodded as if that meant something.

  “Ain’t empty,” Harry said. “Didn’t hear no water sloshing.”

  “We should open it,” Ricky said.

  Everyone nodded, but nobody moved.

  Harry finally spoke. “Need a place we can make sure it stays dry, no wind. Let’s be patient. Do this right. We bring the boat in. Pack up the gear. Then we hit my place. See what we got.”

  Ricky went down to one knee and put his hand on the top of the box. He was surprised by the smile on his own face, but he couldn’t help it. He looked up at Harry and Frank.

  “God was with me down there,” Ricky said.

  After a solemn pause, Ricky smiled and shouted, “We found the fucking thing.” He didn’t curse that often, but this was a special occasion.

  Harry and Frank looked at him, surprised. His smile was contagious, quickly turning to laughter. They laughed and whooped and hollered at the lake around them.

  Bernardo and Ramón stared at them. They shrugged, fired up a joint, and pulled up the anchor.

  Frank handed out the Cuban cigars that he had bought in Los Algodones months before. He had brought them as an afterthought, as a consolation prize for when they didn’t find anything.

  Sitting on the back of the boat smoking cigars with the wind in their faces, they felt like kings. None of them had ever felt like a king before. Not even close. It was a good feeling.

  It took longer than they had anticipated to pack the gear and return the b
oat. Maybe two hours, but it might as well have been a week to Harry, Frank, and Ricky, their excitement percolating.

  Bernardo and Ramón headed back to their ranch. They never asked about the box. They had no natural curiosity. Papa Frank asked for help, so they helped. The way they figured it, they got to go out on the reservoir in a boat, which was nice. They had enjoyed the clouds that looked like dicks.

  Harry, Ricky, and Frank sat in Harry’s cramped and dirty trailer with the rusty box on the cheap folding table.

  Frank and Harry had beers in front of them. Ricky settled for grayish tap water. Frank had offered him a beer, making sure that Ricky knew he was only allowed one. A token of celebration. Ricky had refused it. If he was going to quit, he was going to do it right. No need to give him a taste of temptation. One led to two.

  Things had changed in the waters of the Imperial Reservoir. Ricky had made a turn. It had become about something else. Too important to jeopardize with drink.

  “I sold my torch or I’d cut it open,” Ricky said. He looked away embarrassed, knowing that both Frank and Harry had seen him at his worst. Selling his possessions had been the second-to-last thing he had lost. His family being the final defeat.

  “Don’t sweat it, kid. Wouldn’t’ve worked, anyway. Would’ve burned everything inside,” Frank said.

  Harry got up and rummaged through a couple drawers. “It’s rust. Doc gave me a tetanus booster for my leg, so I’m immune. Couple of hard knocks with the end of a screwdriver’ll bust this sucker wide.”

  A screwdriver ended up being a butter knife. And a couple of hard knocks turned into a lot of sweating, swearing, and scraped knuckles.

  All three of them leaned in with eyes wide when Harry finally wrenched the scuffed and dented lid off the top of the box, his hands stained orange and red from rust and blood.

  “This is it,” Harry said unnecessarily.

  He lifted the lid straight up.

  “Holy shit,” he shouted, retreating until his back hit the wall.

  “Jesus,” Frank said solemnly.

  “So that’s where the head went,” Ricky said, then crossed himself. “Makes sense.”

  “Makes sense? It’s a human head,” Harry yelled. “Makes sense? Yeah. In a crazy, scalping, murdering Indian kind of way.”

  “Grandfather must have been very angry. He never said anything about cutting the head off the man.”

  Harry shouted to the ceiling. “Of course he didn’t. He cut off a white man’s melon. Don’t care how much time has passed, that’s a thing you learn not to divulge. Kind of thing, if you’re proud of it, you’re a certified psycho. Who the hell would brag about that kind of murderous disgustery?”

  Harry peered back into the box. “There’s a canvas bag under the thing. Ricky, take the head out of the box.”

  Ricky looked at the dead man’s head. He thought the skin would have been dry and mummified, but it appeared moist, soapy. The mouth was open but contorted. He saw no teeth. The eyes were gone, too. The glistening pits stared at him. Wispy hair rested on the top of the head and loose atop the stained canvas bag. There was nothing clean about the cut where the head had been severed. It looked like it had been torn off the man’s body. Stringy strands of skin flapped from the ends of the neck.

  “I’m not touching that.”

  “Frank?” Harry said.

  “Hell no,” Frank said.

  Harry pointed at the box. “That’s your grandfather’s handiwork. You have a responsibility to finish your family business. It’s a matter of honor. An ancestral duty.”

  “Now you’re making shit up.” Frank said.

  “Fine. Let Harry do the sick work,” Harry said.

  Harry reached inside the box but stopped himself. He got up, opened the cabinet under his sink, and pulled out an unlined plastic trash can. He picked up the metal box and shook the head into the trash, careful not to disturb the canvas bag beneath it. The waxy head landed in the coffee grounds and beer cans with a dull crunch. Loose hairs drifted to the ground. Harry returned the box to the table and the trash can under the sink.

  “That’s your solution?” Ricky said.

  “You want, I could put it on a pole to scare off door-to-door salesmen.”

  “We should put the head back. It’s the guy’s head,” Ricky said.

  Frank nodded solemnly. “A body without a head. That’s bad. Old Indian stuff. Grandfather wanted the man to be denied his place in the life after life. Remember, this Constance murdered men for gold and greed. Killed to protect the treasure of the Big Maria Mine. Without his head, he will never rest. We have the opportunity to end his journey. If we don’t return the head, his soul wanders, damned. We could be haunted. Or cursed.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Harry said, concern in his voice.

  “No, I’m just messing with you and the kid,” Frank said. “The guy sounded like a bastard. Landfill’s good enough for me.”

  Ricky thought about it. What did it matter what happened to the man’s body, head, or anything after all this time? God didn’t care about a proper burial. His soul was already wherever it was going. Still, a trash can?

  “Can we at least bury it?” Ricky said.

  Harry rolled his eyes and exhaled loudly. “Okay. I’ll take it out to the desert. Put it in the dirt.”

  Ricky nodded, satisfied. “What’s in the bag?”

  Harry reached into the box. He pulled out the canvas bag and brushed some loose hair aside. It had some weight. He poured the contents carefully onto the table. Mostly paper, damp but not wet. Old maps, a journal, some loose handwritten pages. A stack of letters tied together with string.

  And teeth.

  A mouthful of teeth poured out onto the table.

  “Jesus, your grandfather was a sick bastard,” Harry said. “Another Indian thing?”

  “Not that I know of. I’m starting to think Grandfather maybe made up all his Indian legend and lore crap to justify being a psychopath.”

  Ricky picked up one of the teeth, looking at a filling. “We’ve struck gold.”

  Harry reached inside the canvas bag, digging around. “I’ll do you one better.”

  Harry pulled out a nugget of gold as big as his thumb.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Harry poured the remainder of his beer down the sink and went straight to work. He dug through the old maps and logbooks, carefully separating the pages and scanning them for pertinent information. Ricky was surprised at Harry’s quick transformation into studiousness. It was amazing how a chunk of gold increased one’s focus. Without any necessary discussion, Frank acted as Harry’s assistant. He combed through the book, looking for clues, making notes on a yellow pad.

  Ricky wasn’t good at that kind of thing, so he tried to stay out of the way. He had never been good in school or with homework or with numbers. He knew how to use the computer, but mostly to look stuff up that he didn’t know. He was more comfortable lifting things and fixing stuff.

  They took turns holding the gold nugget, and now it sat in front of Ricky on the table, next to a Dixie cup full of black teeth, his chipped glass of stink water, and Abraham Constance’s letters.

  Ricky flipped through the frayed upper corners of the stack of letters, the return address identical on each: H. Constance and an address in Denver. He carefully untied the string that held the dozen letters together. The writing on each yellowed envelope was written in a feminine, old-timey hand.

  He opened the first envelope, taking out the tightly folded paper from inside. He had never read someone else’s mail, and even this hundred-year-old message felt like an invasion. Very carefully, he unfolded the almost see-through paper. The brittle edges chipped at his touch.

  My dearest Abraham...

  His mother? His girlfriend? His wife? People wrote so formally back in the olden days.

  It is with the greatest sorrow that I write this letter to inform you of the death of your eldest son.

  Ricky stopped reading and carefull
y folded the letter. He returned it to the envelope and retied the string.

  He only read the one sentence but had known immediately that it had been wrong. He didn’t want to know about Abraham Constance or about the man’s family or about the events that brought about his end. The man’s head was in a trash can five feet away. He may have been misunderstood. He may have been evil. But no matter what he did and why, every man deserved his secrets.

  “I think I got something.” Harry stood up and stretched his back. The muted cracking sounded like a string of firecrackers immersed in jelly. He didn’t appear excited, but it could have been exhaustion.

  It was almost dawn. Harry had worked for hours without a break. Frank and Ricky had grabbed some shut-eye in shifts on Harry’s torture device of a couch. Between the sofa springs that attacked the kidneys like prison shivs and the events of the day, neither of them could remember if they had dreamed. But if they had dreamed, they were sure they had dreamed about gold.

  Harry spread a map across the dining room table. He had drawn some lines in pen and circled a few areas. Frank wiped sleep from his eyes and joined him. Ricky poured fresh coffee.

  “The man kept decent records. He wasn’t worried about anyone seeing this. Wasn’t in code, pretty straightforward. He had to be able to return to the mine, so he needed a visual map, as well as a regular map. Some of the landmarks will be gone or changed, but between the map and his notes, I think I’ve got a toehold into finding the Big Maria Mine.”

  “Show us,” Frank said.

  “I’ve still got a ton of papers to go through, so I’m a ways from the exact location. I’ve definitely narrowed it down to this area of the Chocolate Mountains.” Harry drew a circle with his finger over an area of mountainous terrain in Arizona to the east of the Colorado River.

  “I thought the Chocolate Mountains were a gunnery range,” Ricky said, vaguely remembering when they had first searched online. A million years ago when he had a life and a family.

  “You’re the one that told me there’s two Chocolate Mountains. The California Chocolates are a gunnery range. There’s gold and mines there, too.” Harry pointed to a spot on the map far to the west near the Salton Sea. “The Big Maria Mine is in the Arizona Chocolates.” He pointed back to the circle he had drawn on the map.