by Lorraine Ray
Hector Fimbres desired to see his own name in print, and was surprised by how pleased and flushed he felt as he conveyed the treasure map home. He hurried back to his apartment above his uncle’s garage and stared flabbergasted at the map entry showing his own encounter with Teddy Redburn. He drank a beer in front of it and toasted the map and his own celebrity. That small amount of fame happening to him left him staggered; Hector wasn’t certain how to deal with his swelling pride. He certainly felt sorry for Teddy Redburn, wherever he was.
Gradually that night, while he studied at the map, Hector wished he could be the one to uncover the money in the satchel. The only problem was, he didn’t have any brilliant idea of where that money would be now.
In a half-hearted attempt at treasure hunting, Hector set out in an arroyo the next Sunday morning. A certain, little-known arroyo had not been searched, Hector imagined. After walking approximately three miles in that river bed, scanning every spot for the leather valise, he tripped on a rock and badly sprained his ankle. Then, executing a climb up a steep slope of the arroyo, he gashed his forehead badly on a pointed mesquite branch. Luckily, his emergency cell phone call reached a tower, but it took three hours for search and rescue crews to reach him after he made his call.
The flexible cast on his ankle which the doctors attached caused a rash a month later, which subsequently got infected. Without insurance he spent more than thirteen hundred dollars on doctor’s visits and medicine. A collection agency harassed his employer at the Los Hombres Service Station until he paid the entire cost of the ambulance that rescued him. So ended his treasure hunting adventure. It also explains why he becomes so angry when people ask him about Teddy Redburn.
12.
You may have wondered if Jasper Claxton ever followed his mother’s instructions to hurry up and hunt for Teddy? He did go hunting and the adventure he had was certainly a corker.
Vince Miller and Jasper Claxton had been friends since the two of them had shared an intense hatred for 4H after they had both joined it by mistake. Neither of them could get out of the club by bellyaching constantly to their parents.
But Vince had always been good with dogs and Jasper’s mother thought a dog would be just the thing to lead Jasper to the corpse and all the money. Jasper was uncertain whether he should share the true purpose of him borrowing Vince’s dog with Vince. He doubted his mother would be willing to share any money he found with Vince, and he worried Vince would see through any made-up story he could concoct about why he wanted to borrow the dog. In the end Jasper decided he would simply say he wanted to try out a dog and he hoped that he remembered Vince’s schedule correctly so that Vince would not be able to go.
That worked out as planned and Vince was fine with the idea of Jasper borrowing the dog. However, Jasper wasn’t sure he had really ever gotten along with that dog. He mostly met Vince at bars or Vince came to Jasper’s house and Jasper’s wife cooked them a steak. In fact, that dog had for a long time struck Jasper as antagonistic to people, openly growling at him a few times. Jasper mulled this over on the way to Vince’s house.
Vince appeared rather carefree about the situation.
“He’ll warm up to you,” said Vince as he struggled to control Baron’s lunges in Jasper’s direction when Jasper arrived. “Don’t worry about it. He’s a people dog.”
Vince loaded the dog into the tiny door of the rear cab of Jasper’s pickup. Already the dog stood on his back legs and tried to fit his mouth around Jasper’s head when he slid behind the wheel. When he couldn’t do that, he barked furiously in Jasper’s ear.
“Just bring him back this afternoon,” said Vince happily. “I’m only working for a few hours.”
All the way out to where Jasper planned to search, the dog barked and fidgeted, but when Jasper finally reached the spot and opened his own door, the German Shephard flew over the seat and lunged at Jasper’s neck.
“Down boy!” Jasper screamed before the dog tried to bite his arm. Jasper fell sideways and almost stumbled into a cactus.
“Ahhh. Down, down. God, help! Help!” screamed Jasper. The dog moved away around a palo verde tree and then came back in at him.
“Baron, get off me!” he ordered in a screechy voice. Baron barked furiously.
Jasper fled down the banks of a shallow arroyo and back up the other side, but the German Shephard stayed with him. Baron’s mouth curled into a smile.
“Down, back. Get off!” Jasper shrieked again when the dog came at him.
“Sheesh!” Jasper danced backward, swatting at the dog’s threatening mouth. Baron was barking and lunging, chasing and snapping at Jasper. At one point the dog bit the seat of his Levis and neatly wrestled Jasper to the ground.
Jasper fought back, but during one scuffle he struggled to his feet in time to find the dog attached to his forearm. Jasper shook the dog off only to have him lunge at his throat again; Jasper threw a punch, missed, and the dog took off loping toward the mountains.
“How will I ever explain this to Vince?” Jasper gasped, daubing the bite on his forearm.
Jasper jumped back into the truck and tried to follow the dog, but it seemed to be running as far away as possible. Jasper gave up and banged his hands against the steering wheel, cursing his luck. He’d just have to go back to Vince’s house and explain what happened. And in all the attacks he hadn’t searched for Teddy Redburn at all. He also had numerous bruises, bites, scrapes, and contusions. Mother was going to be disappointed in him.
He drove up to Vince’s double-wide, but what did he see? He wondered if his eyes were fooling him.
Baron, the vicious dog, stood panting beside his owner.
“Did he jump out of the car as you got back near here?” Vince hollered as Jasper parked.
“Ah, yeah,” said Jasper weakly out the window.
“I knew it. I thought he’d do something silly like that. I was a little worried he’d do something like that when you took him.”
“Well, he did something like that. Thanks for loaning him to me.”
“No problem. Any time. He’s a great dog.”
“Yeah,” agreed Jasper. “He was quite a helper.”
Earlier in the evening on the night after Hans Zwilanski found the fresh earth under the porch of the mansion, when Hans’ wife asked him to take care of the baby while she showered, he waited until the shower taps came on and then slipped outside with the baby in his arms and grabbed a shovel from the shed he kept outback. He tucked the shovel in the oleander hedge at the side of the house and went back in before his wife had lathered the shampoo.
That night, Hans waited until his wife had fallen asleep before he left the house. He walked quickly to the dark mansion and started digging at the footing of the porch where he’d discovered the soft damp earth the night before. It was easy work because the soil was loose, and within a few minutes he thought he was making good progress in a hole that had been dug before. He stopped a moment to wipe his brow and peer around to make sure no one observed him.
No sign of anybody still! This was his lucky day!
Teddy’s home loomed above him. Funny, an awfully lot of the house was there …above…him…
Hans heard an ominous creak in the wood porch. Something near the house let out a thud. His head almost brushed a large oak support beam of the structure.
Crack! The beam split nearer the front of the porch and the entire mass of the left side, above Hans, (including a large specimen rock) crashed onto Hans, cracking his skull open and breaking his neck instantly. He fell dead under the huge pile of rubble.
Hans’ wife woke to find an empty bed the next morning after the porch fell on him. That wasn’t so unusual because sometimes Hans got up early and took the baby outside for walk watching bees on the oleander hedge, however the baby still slept in its crib when she peeked in the door.
She rechecked the house and opened the back door. No sign of Hans in the yard, but someone had left the toolshed unlatched. The door yawned open and shut in the breeze. Ev
en though she still wore her nightie, she stepped out to the shed and closed it tight, swinging the latch in place over the hasp. Only that Ona Gonzalez character lived nearby and she wouldn’t see anything because she probably had left for the beauty parlor which she owned in town.
Maybe Hans had been called to work early, his wife thought. Hans labored as a parts driver three days a week and on some weekend, but sometimes they called him in on other days if somebody got drunk or sick. But she hadn’t heard him go and that was odd because she was always easily awakened in the morning.
And then she noticed that the front door had been left unlocked. Hans never forgot to lock the front door when he left.
And he hadn’t taken his lunch pail, if he’d gone to work.
Later that day a boy walking a dog on Ghost Hat road spotted the body crushed under the front porch of the Redburn mansion.
You might imagine that the death of someone while searching for Teddy’s satchel would dampen the enthusiasm for treasure hunting in Los Hombres, but you’d be wrong. Almost more excited after Hans was crushed, people imagined someone dying meant the story was more apt to be true and that they would be chumps for not trying to locate Teddy’s satchel.
Ona Gonzalez became alarmed at her oldest grandson’s vulnerability. He watched the ambulances take Hans away when he was found under the Redburn porch and this grandson remarked that “he would like to be the one to find all that loot.” Of course, his grandmother pointed out that Hans Zwilanski had also thought that he would be the one to find Teddy’s money, but instead a house fell on top of him. Ona regretted discussing her own quick search in the weeds on the day Ms. Claxton saw her, and anything else she might had said about the search for Teddy’s satchel, and she worried that her grandson was getting notions that work wouldn’t be as much fun as stumbling upon a valise of cash. She tried to stop him from talking about the lost money with any of her other grandchildren.