GOLDEN REICH

by Mark Donahue

  After he watched the last of the twelve trucks rumble onto the rutted pavement of Delaware Avenue, Rolle stood in the dark emptiness of the dock area and suddenly realized he had nowhere to go and no way to get there. Carrying his suitcase, he headed for the only light he could see, about a half mile into the distance. His salvation was Pat’s Diner, an all-night establishment that catered to the dockworkers and truck drivers in and around South Philadelphia.

  “What’ll you be havin’ tonight, darlin’?” a friendly voice asked.

  When Rolle looked up from the greasy menu, he saw a surprisingly attractive blonde woman in her late thirties dressed in a blue and white checked uniform. The name “Linda” was written on a name tag.

  “Coffee and eggs, please.”

  “Toast?”

  “Rye, please.”

  “Well, it’s sure nice to have a gentleman in here instead of the rest of you bums,” Linda said as she looked around the smoke-filled diner, and the group of large men in jeans and denim jackets.

  Rolle smiled and asked, “Linda, could you tell me where I could find a taxi around here?”

  “Oh Lord, it’s kinda late and I doubt they’ll be any cabs until morning. We could try and call one but they don’t like comin’ down here this late at night. Lots of robbin’, you know. Where you headin’?”

  “To your train station. I want to catch a train to Cleveland.”

  “Cleveland?! Well honey, there won’t be any trains leaving here till mornin’ even if you could get to the station.”

  “That is unfortunate. Is there a hotel nearby?”

  “Not too far, but all the rooms is booked with soldiers. Looks like you ain’t having no luck at all tonight darlin,’” Linda said with a smile.

  Rolle smiled back.

  Later in Linda’s room, she lay on Rolle’s shoulder with her eyes closed. Rolle remained awake and stared at the ceiling. He toyed with her blonde hair. Linda opened her eyes and looked up at Rolle. “Ain’t you tired? I mean I thought I wore you out.”

  “I fear if I fall asleep, I will miss my train in the morning.”

  “I love to hear you talk. Where’s that accent from?” Linda asked.

  “I’m from Sweden, although I thought I’d lost my accent years ago.”

  “It ain’t much of one, but I got a good ear. Hey, I don’t work tomorrow, why don’t you stay over another day and I’ll show you ’round town and we can have some more fun tomorrow night.”

  “I’d very much enjoy that, but I must leave tomorrow to attend to business.”

  “Well then, I guess I need to make sure you don’t forget me.”

  Linda smiled, and slid under the covers. After several minutes, Rolle moaned, closed his eyes, and fell into a deathlike slumber.

  The next morning Rolle stirred in bed. He opened his eyes not knowing where he was. He suddenly bolted up in bed and looked at his watch. He began to put on his clothes when Linda entered the room.

  “There you are, sweetie,” Linda said with a smile.

  “Why did you let me sleep?”

  “Well, I figured you needed the rest, darlin,’ especially after you used up all that energy last night.”

  “My train…”

  “Don’t worry, I called the station and there’s a train to Cleveland at 1:30, you got plenty of time. You go get a shower, there’s a clean towel on the door, and I’ll have your breakfast ready for you in a few minutes.”

  After a long hot shower, Rolle dressed and entered the kitchen just in time to see Linda dishing out eggs, scrapple, and biscuits. Hearing Rolle enter the room, Linda said cheerfully, “Morning, Kurtis.”

  Stopped in his tracks, Rolle asked, “How do you know my name?”

  “When I picked up your pants to wash them, your wallet fell on the floor and some cards fell out and I saw your name. You really livin’ in Berlin? I thought people were tryin’ to get away from that crazy Hitler guy? By the way, you can count your money; I never took any. Last night was for free. You want some coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Rolle sat down at the kitchen table shaken by what he had just heard.

  “I have some friends who just got out of Germany, and they said it was crazy over there,” Linda said as she sat down and watched Rolle eat his breakfast.

  “I do work for the Swedish government but travel frequently.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Accounting.”

  “Well, you finish your breakfast and I’ll start washing these dishes so we can say goodbye the right way.”

  Linda moved to the sink, turned her back to Rolle, and began filling it with water. She did not at first hear Rolle come up behind her and was a bit startled when she felt his hands on her shoulders. He then moved his hands to her breasts. Linda moaned and leaned back into Rolle. When she did, Rolle bent down and kissed her neck. Linda’s moan deepened. Rolle moved his hands up toward Linda’s neck.

  “Mmm, that feels real good, Kurtis, but we’re gonna have to wait for a few minutes. My boss Billy will be droppin’ off my check any minute since I won’t be workin’ today. Once he leaves, we can play some more. That okay?”

  Rolle dropped his hands from Linda’s neck and returned to the kitchen table. Linda rejoined him at the table and stared across at him. “Sure glad you stopped in the diner last night. Also glad all those hotels was sold out. At least I think they were sold out,” Linda said with a smile. “Think you’ll be back this way anytime soon?”

  “I am quite certain I will, and if so, I would like to partake of your hospitality when I return.”

  “I just love to hear you talk. Sure, anytime you’re in town you just call or hell, just stop in…anytime. I put my phone number in your wallet as a helpful reminder.”

  “Thank you. I promise I will return.”

  “You know, I got a two-week vacation saved up, but I don’t guess you’d want a travlin’ companion, I mean I like Cleveland…”

  “I’m sorry, my business would not allow me…”

  A bit embarrassed by the turndown, Linda said, “No problem. I understand.”

  A knock at her front door helped break the uneasiness in the air. “Must be Billy,” Linda said. She opened the door, and her boss entered the kitchen. “Hey Billy, thanks for bringin’ my check over. This is my friend Kurtis; he’s from Sweden but works in Germany.”

  Billy was a short, compact man with a thick neck and powerful arms that were gilded with tattoos, some obscene.

  “Hey Kurtis. I’m Billy, how the hell are you?”

  “Hello, Billy.”

  “So you just passin’ through or are you here to stay?”

  “Just passing through although I will return very soon.”

  “You work in Germany, huh?”

  “Only temporarily, I am an accountant.”

  Billy stared at Rolle for several seconds.

  “Swedish, huh?”

  “Yes, Swedish,” Rolle said. “Well, I must be going, I want to make it to the train station on time.”

  “If you walk down to the diner, you can grab a cab there. I’ll wait for you and we can walk down together,” Billy said helpfully.

  “That won’t be necessary; I can…”

  “No problem, just take your time and we can get acquainted on our walk.”

  “Very well. Let me get my things.”

  After Rolle returned to the bedroom to get his suitcase, Linda sneered at her boss. “Billy, I wanted to say goodbye to him…you know.”

  “I don’t like that sonovabitch. You don’t even know him. What if he’s a pre-vert or something?”

  When Rolle returned with his bag, he agreed with Billy. “Your friend is right, Linda; you can’t be too careful these days with strangers.” Rolle then drove his switchblade into Billy’s heart four times, killing him before
he hit the floor.

  Stunned into silence, Linda could not at first utter a sound. Finally, she said hoarsely, “I guess you have to kill me too, right?”

  “It would be best, Rolle said matter-of-factly.

  “Oh…but I don’t like knives…”

  “Very well.” Rolle grabbed Linda by the neck with his left hand and pushed her against the wall. He continued to push until her larynx was crushed. He continued to push until her eyes bulged, her face turned a dark red, then a darker blue. He pushed until she was dead, and her body slid to the floor. For several minutes he continued pushing, entranced by the expression of mild surprise on Linda’s face.

  Rolle’s trip to Arizona was a more direct one. After catching a cab at the diner as Billy had suggested, he boarded a train at 30th Street Station to Cleveland, where he received twelve phone calls at his prearranged hotel from his men making their way across America. He confirmed their locations by return calls to numbers they gave him.

  Over the next five days, he traveled through Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, and finally to Phoenix. Each night he received calls, made return calls, and slept in hotels near the train station.

  The most serious problem encountered by one of his crews was a flat tire in Missouri. A local farmer and his fourteen-year-old son helped Rolle’s men change the tire when they couldn’t operate the jack. As a precaution, Rolle’s men slit the throats of the farmer and his son and buried their bodies in a nearby cornfield.

  As a student, Rolle had been fascinated by the United States, studying its history and geography as well as mastering English with only the slightest German accent. He remembered his father had told him that America was an “experiment” and the jury was still out as to whether its amalgamation of peoples and cultures would congeal into a true country.

  Rolle knew of the race problems that plagued America and was surprised at the number of black people he saw moving with seeming freedom in the cities in which he stopped. He wondered why white Americans would work so closely with such vermin and not feel revulsion. He also wondered how Americans would want to fight and die for such a diseased and decadent country. He wished he could inform his father that the American Experiment had failed.

  Chapter 18

  Arizona Desert—2012

  “What is that?” Jon asked.

  “I don’t know, why don’t you go down, pick it up, and see.”

  “First of all, I don’t want to fall on my face, and it’s covered with about four gallons of your piss.”

  Looking down into the creek bed, Tom and Jon saw a shimmering reflection that seemed entwined in tree roots. The men scooted down the embankment not feeling the hot desert dirt on their asses. Tom reached the object first and, displaying acute archeological aptitude at the possibility of a potentially important discovery, kicked it. When that did not free the object from the roots, he kicked it again. “What the hell is that?” Jon asked, as he finally took a chance at touching the object after the arid Arizona air had safely evaporated Tom’s piss.

  “Whatever it is, it’s wrapped tight in those roots.”

  On one knee, Jon tried loosening the object. It was two to three inches in width, with one inch exposed above the creek bed. Jon was almost afraid at what he thought the object to be, yet he could not break the grip of the roots on whatever they held.

  “Hand me that sharp rock over there,” Tom said, pointing to a flat piece of granite five inches wide with an arrowhead shape. Taking the rock from Jon, he wedged it under the root, put his weight on the thick end, and stepped down.

  “Holy shit,” Tom spat, as the material wrapped around the object broke loose and pieces hit him in the face.

  After he picked up and examined what had flown into Tom’s face, Jon said, “Hey big boy, these ain’t roots.”

  “What is it?” Tom asked, fearing he knew the answer.

  “I’d say it’s what’s left of someone’s hand.”

  Moving next to Jon for a closer look, Tom moved away bone and remnants of leathered skin with a stick, then put his fingers around the object and tried to pick it up but it did not move. Reverting to leg power, he put his heel on the object and slowly his 250 pounds began to move it, like a tooth being pushed back and forth in a gum to loosen it. Again, he tried to pull on the object with his fingers, but the Arizona dirt held its grip.

  “Here, let’s dig away some of the dirt around it,” Tom said.

  “You know what it looks like, don’t you? It looks like fucking gold,” Jon said.

  “Shut up and dig.”

  “Really, it looks like fucking gold.”

  Using their stick tools, the men exposed eight inches of “something” and suddenly stopped their frenetic action, staring at what had emerged from the desert.

  Tom sat on the ground, the object between his legs. He dug his heels into the sand, put both hands on the stubborn enigma, and pulled. This time the desert released its prize. As it did, Tom fell backward against the side of the creek bed and held the ingot directly above his head. Walking over to his prone, motionless friend, Jon grasped the bar, and as Tom released it, he almost dropped it on Tom’s head, unprepared for its weight.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we may have a winner.” Jon whispered as he looked at the gold ingot, which shone brightly in what had become a sunny Arizona afternoon in more ways than one.

  “It’s gold, isn’t it?” Tom almost pleaded. “Tell me it’s gold. OK, even if you know it’s a yellow hubcap, just tell me it’s gold so I know how I’d feel if I found a bar of gold in the desert while I was taking a piss.”

  “It’s gold.” Jon said, not taking his eyes off the ingot or its lettering that said Property of Canadian Government.

  “Holy shit,” Tom whispered, as he took the ingot from Jon. “Let’s look around, maybe we can find one for you too.”

  “What do you think it weighs?”

  “I’d guess about fifteen pounds,” Tom said, as he lifted the bar like a weightlifter doing curls.

  “What’s gold going for these days?” Jon asked, not taking his eyes off the ingot.

  “Last I heard it was over fifteen hundred dollars an ounce.”

  “Shit, I can’t even remember how many ounces are in a pound.”

  “Sixteen.” Tom muttered as he knelt in the sand with a stick and did some quick and inaccurate calculations. “Sixteen ounces times, say fifteen pounds, is two hundred forty ounces, times fifteen hundred dollars is…around $36,000!”

  “Damn, nice little nugget we just....”

  “No, wait! I left off a zero. My God…that’s $360,000!”

  Jon said nothing at first but then whispered the all-encompassing and universally understood statement of awe: “Fuck me!”

  “Tom, Jon, where the hell are you two?” Anderson’s voice echoed from the road. “Jim’s coming!”

  Jarred from their gold lust, the men looked at each other with the same question in their eyes; “Now, what do we do?”

  “We have to go,” Jon said.

  “I know, but what do we do with our retirement here?”

  Looking around for a safe or vault and finding none, Jon finally said, “We can’t leave it here in the creek. If it rains tonight, we’ll never find it.”

  “I’ve got an idea, give it to me.”

  Handing the bar to Tom and following him back toward the road, Jon said, “You can’t take it back to the farm; they’ll find it during the security check going back in.”

  “I know,” Tom said, as he climbed up an incline using natural stairs made of exposed rocks. He stumbled onto the road out of sight of Baker and Anderson. “Here, I’ll put it right here under mile marker 19. We’ll get on the paving crew next week and come back and put it in a safer spot.”

  The white marker was bent and rusted but the numbers clearly visible. Tom grabbed a pointe
d rock and began excavating a hole in the gravel and dirt that made up a soft shoulder at the side of the road. Burying the ingot at a ninety degree angle to the road, he covered it with a mound of rocks and loose dirt. As he put the last of the rocks on the gold, a series of long horn blasts reverberated through the valley.

  “Shit,” the men said simultaneously and began to sprint toward the blaring horn.

  Rounding the bend in the road, still a quarter mile from the van, they saw Jim, shotgun in hand, heading toward them.

  “Where the fuck have you assholes been?” Jim screamed, his eyes bloodshot reflecting the fact that five tequilas will make most men drunk and some men drunk and mean. Jim fell into the latter category. “One more fuckin’ minute and I was gonna call for backup and come after your sorry asses.”

  “We were just looking for a place to take a piss in private, that’s all.” Tom said. “We were only gone a few minutes.”

  “Bullshit. You faggots were probably lookin’ for a place to make it on work time. Get in the fucking van and keep quiet.”

  “We were done with…,” Jon tried to explain.

  “Shut up, faggot. Ya’ll get into the van ’fore I shoot your asses.”

  “But we didn’t leave the work site,” Baker whined.

  “I meant the other faggots…faggot.”

  On the drive back to camp, Jon redid the math and confirmed that the ingot they found was, on a good gold price day, worth over $350,000. But where had it come from? Being in the bottom of the creek bed, it was conceivable that the ingot, despite its weight, could have been washed downstream for miles over many years. And what of the death grip of the hand that held the bar? Whose hand? And what made him hold on even after death?

  Tom and Jon said little during the hour-long drive back to the prison. They were both immersed in questions about what they had discovered. For the first time in a combined nine years in prison, both men were looking forward to their next week on the job.

  Unfortunately, Jim the Asshole made sure it would be eighteen months before Tom or Jon were able to return to mile marker 19. The next day they were given jobs in the laundry and cafeteria, punished for wandering from their work assignment on the dirt road.