"We're paid up through tomorrow, Lars, so let's make the best of the day. Tomorrow is the Glorious Fourth and I guess there will be some kind of fireworks down here," he said, staring out the window down at the packed beach. He looked for some time and then turned around, smiling.
"I have a wonderful idea, Eric. I think we can make it a really memorable Fourth for everyone, including the Chamber of Commerce. First, help me get that old suitcase of fake jewelry out from under the bed and we can just see how much fun there is in giving stupid people a lesson in greed."
9.
The lesson commenced about three thirty in the morning. The beach had been cleared by the police of drunks, drug addicts in a state of bliss, people engaged in various kinds of fornication and late swimmers, at one. The concessions had closed down at two and by three thirty, the pair had the beach entirely to themselves.
At a point about thirty feet from the edge of the boardwalk and toward its northern end, they dug a shallow trench in the sand with their hands. When this was finished, they filled it with a glittering heap of fake rings, pearls, cheap but elegant watches, bracelets, necklaces and hundreds of other pieces. This pile of delusion was carefully covered with sand, and a beach towel that Chuck had stolen from the deck of the motel was laid across a portion of it and the pair retreated under the edge of the boardwalk to await the coming day.
It was damp and confined in their hiding place and it smelt of urine and stale beer but they sat through the remains of the evening until a lightening sky proclaimed the coming dawn.
Chuck had given Lars very explicit instructions and Lars followed them to the letter. He was wearing a pair of cutoffs, a holed T-shirt with the fading printing "Shit Happens" and he lay down on the towel and tried to look like a typical beach person.
A few minutes later, the first of the legitimate visitors began to arrive and by the time the sun was fully up and roasting the occupants of the cluttered sand, Lars was very hot and was now wearing only the shorts, displaying a well-defined, muscular anatomy.
No one paid much attention to him, except for a small boy with a harelip who made weird noises in his direction and finally went away and urinated extensively on an elderly woman who was sitting with her back against an aluminum beach chair. She was entirely oblivious to her damp and warming back and continued an interminable conversation with her long dead husband and her equally deceased cousin, Winnie.
When Chuck, who was wandering around the beach and walking up and down the boardwalk, decided that the beach was as full of the holiday crowd as it was going to get, he made a signal to Lars by pulling on his ear.
Lars then sat up, blinked at the large clots of sweaty and noisy humanity and began to dig about him in the sand. Very quickly, he pulled up a rope of faux pearls, exclaiming in a loud voice, "Jesus, look at this! Is this yours, lady?"
This was addressed to an overweight woman who was lying on her back about five feet away. As soon as she saw the pearls, she lurched to her feet.
"Yeah, I dropped those!"
Before she could close with him, Eric got up and ran off, dragging the towel with him. This act disclosed several other valuable pieces which were lying on top of the sand.
The woman let out a shriek and gave up her lumbering pursuit of Eric, preferring instead to root in the sand like some kind of a bloated badger.
She pulled up two necklaces before the people in the vicinity noticed what was happening and then the fun commenced.
Lars joined Chuck on the boardwalk and they watched, entranced, at the high drama being enacted before their very eyes.
It was as if a great magnet in the sand had somehow been activated and all the greased, sweating humanity on the dirty beach was slowly being drawn into its field. In the center of the vortex was a screaming, writhing mass of people, digging in the sand, attacking each other, trying to stuff the sandy loot down into their clothing and then being assaulted by a dozen people at once.
Elderly visitors were punched and kicked, screaming children thrown through the air, beefy males hurled themselves on top of anyone who looked like a finder and ripped off their minimal beach wear to see what they could discover. They, in turn, were assaulted by other beefy males and, even more entertaining, screaming women who clawed and bit at anything and everything in their path in their frenzied search for loot.
Bloody nudity was the rule, not the exception and while Lars was waiting to see naked children, Chuck turned his attention away from the Walpurgis on the sand and towards the businesses along the boardwalk.
He rushed into the first one, waving a gold watch.
"My God," he shouted, "look what I found on the beach! A solid gold Rolex! Jesus, the beach is full of this stuff!"
And without further let or hindrance, the entire shop emptied with the sole exception of a young girl behind the counter. She looked undecided until Chuck waved to her.
"Quick, get some of this while you can!"
And out she went, leaving him in sole possession of the store. In a few moments, he was also in full possession of all the money in the cash registers at which point he moved on to the next store.
The uproar on the beach below them was enough to get the attention of the occupants of the various concessions and Chuck's appearance with various specimens of fake jewelry was always enough to empty out the shop, workers and all.
He worked his way calmly down the line, stuffing his pockets and his underpants with wads of money. He always left the silver and the checks behind, then went on his way, heading away from the turmoil. The last place of business was the fast food chain that he had found so interesting earlier.
There was no problem emptying this one either and the take from the six cash registers was more than gratifying.
Picking up a hamburger from the counter, he went out the rear door and onto the service walk behind. Directly overhead he heard the rumblings of the roller coaster and the big, timbered structure rattled and shook as the cars passed a few yards over his head.
There was a large pile of empty cardboard boxes stacked neatly against the wooden wall of the back of the concession and with great swiftness, Chuck set fire to three of them.
Just to create a diversion he thought as he exited the area, munching on his hamburger.
A few minutes later, Lars saw him emerge from the edge of the boardwalk, just finishing the last of his impromptu meal, a billowing cloud of black smoke rolling up from somewhere behind him.
"Hey buddy, enjoying the fun?" Chuck said, a thin piece of shredded lettuce plastered to his chin.
Lars pointed at the thick column of black smoke that was now enveloping a good part of the roller coaster.
"Oh Chuck, the place is on fire!"
His companion turned around, a bemused look on his face.
"Why so it is, Lars, so it is. Lucky I got out of there before I was cooked."
The beach now resembled nothing more than a riot at a Puerto Rican rock and roll concert and eventually, the police arrived in force and were clubbing anyone who moved. More than a few of the upholders of law and order joined the mad hunt for treasure and no one at all paid any attention to the huge fire now raging out of control only a few yards above their heads.
The fire department arrived but with so many people fighting in the parking lot they had great difficulty in finding the fireplugs.
Chuck tapped Lars on the shoulder, just as paramedics dragged two-wheeled stretchers past them with very bloody rioters heaped high up on them. The scene reminded Chuck of old drawings of the progression of the Dead Carts through a town visited by the plague.
"Lars, let's go back to the motel and watch this from the window. OK?"
That was easier said than done because the word of the great treasure had spread throughout the land due to the actions of a dimwitted local disk jockey and half of Santa Cruz was arriving, abandoning their cars in the middle of the roadways in order to miss neither fun nor profit.
Chuck and Lars had to shove t
heir way through the crowds and Chuck was not above jamming his knee with great force into the crotches of men or slamming his fist into the breasts of women. By this means, he quickly cleared a path through the surging humanity and they eventually gained the safety of their room.
Lars had lost his shorts, displaying briefs with roses imprinted, and one tennis shoe.
Chuck's sunglasses, which he adopted as a disguise, had been knocked off and trampled underfoot when some woman vainly tried to punch him back after having her sagging breasts savagely wrenched.
They were breathing very hard in hoarse gasps but the scene on the beach in front of them produced so much screaming and shouting that they could both have been eaten by rabid lions and no one would have heard them screaming from an adjoining room. Of course there were no guests in any of the rooms. They were all out on the deck watching the inferno to the south and wondering why the beach was filled with crazed people.
Chuck leisurely stripped off all of his clothes, shoes and socks and then threw piles of damp money onto one of the beds.
When Lars turned to look at him, he saw the money and blinked.
"Chuck, is that the money from your Chinese friend?"
"No," replied Chuck, wrapping a towel around his midsection, "I left that at the apartment, locked up. That's money from the shops down there."
He pointed to the boardwalk, which was now totally enveloped in flames.
"I imagine, Lars, that Hell looks more or less like that."
"Ooh Chuck, look there!" Lars shouted as a roller coaster string of cars suddenly rocketed off into space when a portion of the supporting timbers collapsed. The cars, filled with screeching occupants, described a graceful arc as they descended rapidly to the ground, landing squarely in the center of a large group of local citizens pressing towards the beach.
Chuck watched the descent with detached interest.
"Well now there is something you just don't see anymore, Lars. Try to remember all of this so you can tell it to your children when you're teaching them CPR."
The fire had reached a storage area where the roller coaster maintenance people kept lubricating oil and the 55-gallon drums began to ignite. Flaming like rockets, the drums shot up into the air in great, blazing curves only to succumb to gravity and plunge to earth again, generally landing on the roofs of older buildings in the neighborhood, occasional cars, parked and moving, and several spectators.
"Well, Eric, it looks like the fireworks started a little early today. I'm glad we didn't miss any of it. You know I'm very patriotic and I love nothing better than fireworks on the Fourth of July."
The entire area was enveloped in smoke, shot through with occasional flashes of bright orange and yellow flames. A number of cars in the parking lots caught on fire and added the stench of burning rubber and plastic upholstery to the thoroughly un-sanitized environment. Fire equipment came from as far away as San Jose and Monterey and it was not until late in the evening that the blazes were finally brought under control.
By then, the entire beach area was a charred disaster, over sixty private cars were destroyed as were twenty-seven buildings, the roller coaster, twenty-three businesses and a small hotel.
Two hundred and fifteen people were injured, some seriously, and one hundred and seventeen were dead at the scene or died later in hospitals.
The damage was estimated by gasping television commentators as being in the hundreds of millions of dollars. When it was discovered that the purported treasure was composed entirely of costume jewelry, the media suddenly fell very silent and the story ceased to have any interest to the stations, the reporters or the executives. It was their collective attitude that the viewing public likes neat, reasonable and prompt final solutions to problems. The exposure of the Great Treasure Hunt as a hoax with such enormous consequences would be most unwise. The public would demand answers that might take weeks to arrive at and there was always was the very distinct possibility that the carnage was the result of anti-social actions on the part of disgruntled minorities.
Should this have proven to be the case, no television network in the country would dare to air it or make even the slightest hint that America's minorities were anything but intelligent, productive and honest. That this concept was a reverse image of the truth was something that would never be even thought of in private, let alone aired in public.
College students were privately blamed for a terrible joke that backfired but a new Congressional scandal involving the looting of Social Security and the long-vanished Federal Employees Pension funds quickly took pride of place on the evening news.
Earlier, looking down on the surreal scene from the motel, Chuck was still wearing only his towel while Lars was in the bathroom taking the third shower that afternoon. It was his way of ignoring the disaster on their doorstep.
Finally, Lars emerged, pink and damp, from the bathroom. Clouds of steam poured out into the room, making it a miniature of the scenes outside.
"How much money did you get, anyway, Chuck?"
Chuck turned his gaze away from the ruins of the boardwalk.
"Well, we can count it, can't we?"
They had taken in over fifteen thousand dollars which would never be missed.
Because of the shambles in the streets, it was shortly after noon the next day when the last car blocking the road had been towed off and the pair checked out of the motel and drove back to Santa Clara again.
This time, when they passed the sign about a frugal Jesus, Eric laughed.
The city of Santa Cruz had taken five years to recover from a major earthquake but it never completely recovered from what was later called "The Great Fourth Fire."
As no one had any idea how it started, a number of television documentary producers subsequently concocted various improbable scenarios to account for the disaster.
A born-again Christian production firm created the story that a peyote-crazed member of a Satanic cult had set a cat on fire as part of some obscure ritual and in its death agonies, it had run under the boardwalk to die while still blazing like a Yule log.
It was their thesis that the cult members planned to abolish Christianity and replace it with a form of celestial Bingo.
A number of aged or otherwise mentally infirm witnesses were found who, for ten dollars each, were willing to claim, on camera of course, that they had actually seen the flaming cat as well as the cult member dressed in a red cloak and wearing a black jock strap with steel studs spelling out the name of a well-known secular/humanist politician.
Another producer, who was Jewish, produced an epic that blamed the entire business on a hidden but very large movement of neo-Nazis who were attempting to establish the Fourth Reich in America, abolish school lunches and turn Arizona into a gigantic concentration camp, complete with a soap factory and a lampshade concern. They were waiting on the beach for the appearance of an ancient German submarine carrying the mummified corpse of Adolf Hitler.
The blazing concessions were a signal to the U-boat to land a brigade of SS men dressed like Iowa farm wives and all armed with razor sharp garden implements and copies of Mein Kampf in Spanish, California's new first language.
This version immediately received effusive accolades in the national press for the unquestioned brilliance of its concept and the perfection of its production, but was actually watched by far fewer people than had seen the Bingo Master version. The general public was far more interested in owning large television sets than in actually watching their flickering imagery and had long ago grown bored with the endlessly repeated soft soap legend.
The truth is not in most people and certainly not in documentary producers.
10.
The television set in one of the apartment's bedrooms was showing endless clips of the Santa Cruz inferno while Chuck sat cross-legged on his bed, snipping his toenails.
Beside him on the bed were large, neat piles of money, a notebook, a pen and a pocket calculator.
Some fortunate cam
eraman caught the last act of the aged roller coaster and it played over and over again with zoom-ins to the area where the cars had landed.
Chuck thought it looked like someone had dropped a cherry pie on the pavement from altitude and stamped heartily on it afterwards.
In the living room, Lars was staring intently at his television that was displaying his newly acquired treasures, and making gargling noises deep in his throat.
A young and innocent maiden selling Girl Scout cookies would have had a difficult, probably painful (but instructive), experience had she chanced to peddle her wares in the apartment complex that late afternoon and made the disastrous decision to bang on the wrong door.
Later, Chuck went into the kitchen and put some pork chops into the broiler.
"Are you decent, Eric? Can I come out there?"
There was a spate of mumbling followed by the silence of the awful background music on the tape currently being watched.
"I'm just fine, Chuck. What do you want?"
"Dinner in a few minutes."
Lars was red in the face as he worked his way through a dinner of pork chops, sweet potatoes, applesauce and cornmeal buns.
"Enjoy your National Geographic tapes, Lars? A bit of nudity in old Africa?"
Lars mumbled something unheard.
"What? Speak up, lad. Don't talk with your mouth full as Lenin said to his wife while she was under his desk."
"I said there are no black people on those tapes."
"There are none left alive in Africa anyway. They've all died of AIDS. Which I suppose is a good thing for all the wildlife. There won't be any more killing of elephants, lions, cape buffalo, dik-diks, zebra..."
"What? What did you say? Killing dicks?"
"A small ruminant, Lars, not a penis. The natives have been screwing each other up the ass for years and now they're all dead or dying. It's wonderful to see what happens when the evil white man leaves an area. Instead of a beautiful native culture flowering, we have mass buggery and protracted death."
Lars cleaned his plate and rummaged around in the kitchen looking for more.
Conversations With the Crow Page 72