Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  “WALLY, GIVE HIM THE GODDAMNED COMMODE!” she shouted.

  Things are different in the world now. I blame cable television where folks seem compelled to cuss like longshoremen. However, in 1934 Tesoro, California, no one had ever heard an elementary school teacher utter anything more wicked than “darn” or “heck.” So, you can understand how a full-blown “goddamned” from Judy Buford quieted the Boys’ Fart Chorus along with everyone else standing around outside Fort Buford. Even Miss Lizzie was shocked into silence as was Coach Wally. His mouth formed a perfect O and he ducked behind the curtain. The crowd had gone silent and now eavesdropped, scarcely breathing, as the coach and his wife flung whispers sharp as razor blades back and forth at each other from behind the window bars. After a minute or so the coach pulled aside the curtain and looked out. Milton Garwood waited on the porch, his welder’s mask pushed back on his head, a smug grin on his face.

  “Get us out of here, you son of a bitch,” Coach Wally said.

  Milton made such short work of the vault door one had to wonder if Alameda Safes & Security had sold the Bufords a lemon. He fired up his torch and cut the combination dial out of the thing in about ten minutes, exposing the interior tumblers. He then reached inside and manually pulled back the bolts, unlocking the door. It immediately began to swing open, allowing a blast of malodorous air to rush out of the house along with Judy Buford who shouldered past Milton and stumbled down the steps. Halfway up the front walk she stopped and bent over, hands on her knees, her chest heaving as she took one deep breath after another.

  “The commode…” she called out to Milton. “Get the goddamned thing out of there. It’s yours.”

  Coach Wally had joined her by then. He was far less olfactorily indisposed than his wife and started to make a pitch in favor of stiffing Milton on their agreement.

  “Aw now, Judy,” he began.

  “Don’t even start with me,” she snapped. “I mean it, Wally. Don’t even start.”

  Milton Garwood went inside and removed the chamber pot from the commode, chuckling when he saw Miss Sprinkles’ contribution to the morning’s festivities slowly drying at the bottom of the bowl. He still wore his welder’s gloves and retrieved the dainty little pellets, adding them to the chamber pot before hauling the toilet out to his buckboard.

  “Pleasure doing business with you, Wally,” he called out once seated atop the wagon with his team’s reins in his hands and Miss Sprinkles back on his head.

  It was September 10, 1934. Three months and one week had elapsed since I discovered the ambergris on the beach. Summer vacation was over. Late that night the Bufords slept with the front door to their house pushed wide open while across town Milton Garwood snored peacefully, trusting Miss Sprinkles to guard his slightly used but mostly new jeweled commode. The rest of us slept, too. When midnight passed it would mark the end of ninety days since the Boops set up their folding tables in the assembly room of the town hall and put nearly the entire village in debt to Cyrus Dinkle. We would awaken to the ninety-first day, the trap the Ambergrisians had set for the ex-gunrunner already sprung.

  Chapter Twenty-six:

  A pheasant in the brush

  On the same morning Coach Wally and wife Judy locked themselves inside Fort Buford, Dinkle’s man walked from the estate to the mercantile and postal exchange. He could have driven but preferred the walk. Open air and a distant horizon had been his allies in Mother Russia, a place where Grand Duke Pavlovich and his ilk had for centuries skirted retribution for their acts by throwing peasants like Yurievsky into the pit. Fear of confinement was the vulture on his shoulder in those days, and as a soldier, he came to prefer a drafty tent to the stifling post barracks, an open sky to the ceiling of cracked plaster inside the St. Petersburg apartment he far too occasionally shared with Olga and Irina. Besides, during those few minutes spent on the road from the estate to the village he could pretend to be the old Sergei Yurievsky—husband to Olga, father of Irina—anything but Dinkle’s man.

  He reached the village and then the street leading to Fort Buford, glancing at the commotion less than a block away. A crowd was gathered around one of the houses. There was a good bit of laughter. The windows of the house had bars and the front door was made of iron with a combination lock. He hesitated. The affairs of the villagers were trivial—petty loyalties or squabbles, insignificant accords or disagreements. They were not his affairs. Still, he perceived comfort and predictability in their lives he might have thought enviable as a young man. They belonged to something, to each other. In Russia he, too, had belonged to something: the Imperial Army, Olga and his sweet Myshka. Their affairs had been his.

  He did not further investigate the hubbub going on at the house with the iron door and the bars on its windows, instead continuing on to the mercantile. When he entered, Fiona Littleleaf was behind the counter.

  “Good morning, Mister Yurievsky,” she called out.

  “Miss Littleleaf,” he replied, offering the dignified nod learned from Grand Duke Pavlovich.

  She turned to retrieve Dinkle’s mail without being asked, afterward handing over three letters and a packet bound by string.

  “Not much today,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Yurievsky replied. He turned to go and then hesitated as if he were just another villager, someone taking a few minutes to talk with her about things of little significance, not because they mattered, but because they didn’t; because simply sharing a few minutes distinguished a brief encounter from a relationship.

  “Something else, Mister Yurievsky? We’ve some lovely apricot scones. Perhaps you’ve time for one?”

  Yurievsky shook his head.

  “That’s a shame. They really are lovely scones.”

  Fiona smiled and then held up a hand.

  “Wait,” she said.

  She retrieved a small paper sack and plucked two scones from the basket on her counter.

  “Take them with you,” she said, handing the sack to Yurievsky.

  Dinkle’s man began to reach for his wallet, but Fiona stopped him.

  “No charge,” she said. “They’re on the house.”

  “Thank you,” Yurievsky replied. He nodded again and then exited the mercantile.

  On the way back to the Dinkle estate the tall Russian retrieved one of the scones from the bag and nibbled on it. He appreciated a kindness, few of them sent his way over the years. His Myshka had always been kind to him during his too seldom leaves home from the Imperial Army. When he sat for too long, staring into the fireplace as if the heat and smoke coursing up the chimney could carry off harsh memories, she invariably crawled into his lap. “Don’t be sad, Papa,” she would say. “I love you ever so much.”

  He reached the street that led to Fort Buford. This time he stopped. A crowd continued to mill about the place. A buckboard attached to a team of horses had been added to the congregation. He swiveled his head to look in the opposite direction. The same street would take him to the water…to the marina and the boathouse.

  The boathouse.

  The former Russian soldier had been both a spy and an assassin—professions that required one to become a specter—and on the same night the too-handsome chemist had dined with the old man, Yurievsky had put aside his book, arisen from his bed, and made his way to Dinkle’s own boathouse. There, he retrieved a kayak and put to sea. He’d had no difficulty breaching the laughable security put forth by the villagers. With dawn still three hours away and the now-awake banker fighting off sleep by pacing the walkway on the landward side, Yurievsky had silently paddled to within twenty meters of C. Herbert Judson’s boathouse before slipping into the water and under the seaward door. Inside, he discovered why the village leaders had been so anxious at the town meeting. The boathouse was empty except for a terrible odor and an orange crate containing what appeared to be a huge egg.

  Yurievsky resumed walking down
the road toward the estate. He had not yet told Dinkle. It was unnecessary. The old man would eventually know, anyway, and the villagers knew it. It was information of no value. No, he thought, it is not the empty boathouse they have concealed but their knowledge of it. That was the pheasant yet to be flushed. And he intended to flush it. “All secrets have reasons for being secret,” Grand Duke Pavlovich always said. “Find the reason and you unearth the secret.”

  Yurievsky agreed. There were many pheasants concealed in the cornfield the villagers and Dinkle had together planted, many secrets. All were worthwhile to know. And, for now, he alone knew where all the pheasants were hiding.

  Chapter Twenty-seven:

  The fourth town meeting

  On September 11, 1934, the ninety-first day, the largest collection of certified mail in the history of Tesoro, California, was delivered. The content of each letter was filled with “pursuants” and “thereins” and “breach ofs,” but the gist was that The Cyrus Dinkle Company, thereafter known as “Company,” was laying claim to the ambergris shares used as collateral by the letter recipient, thereafter known as “Borrower,” by “foreclosure pursuant to a failure to indicate in writing a desire to extend the line of credit agreement beyond ninety days, the aforementioned a breach of contract therein.”

  The certified letters began to arrive at 8:00 a.m. and the queue formed at C. Herbert Judson’s office within minutes. Around twenty past eight, our town lawyer showed the first couple into his private chamber. For the next five minutes the only sound from behind the heavy oaken door was the low hum of Mr. Judson’s voice. Then the wailing and table-pounding started. At eight-thirty, Mrs. C. Herbert Judson tentatively cracked the door and poked her head inside.

  “Herb, there’s a line all the way to the edge of town,” she reported. “I think maybe you should get everyone together to talk about this.”

  Mr. Judson agreed, and at nine-thirty, the fourth town meeting was convened. Everyone was there save Cyrus Dinkle, his man, and Miss Sprinkles, a hastily put together sign posted outside the assembly room of the town hall barring all three. no monkeys or dirty rotten skunks, it said.

  For once Coach Wally Buford had no interest in the moderator’s gavel; indeed, he was clearly reluctant to remind people about who had led the charge into what appeared to be a catastrophic mass default. Rather than sit on the stage with the rest of the town leaders, he took a seat next to wife Judy near the back, his round eyes ostensibly fascinated by the floorboards at his feet. I was up front alongside the Ambergrisians, our number increased by two: my mother and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson. Ma and James sat on either side of me, their eyes moving over the crowd as warily as Secret Service agents. With no argument from Coach Wally, Mr. Johns was nominated and elected moderator. He promptly turned the meeting over to Mr. Judson.

  “I know you’re all confused about the default notices and I will try to explain them to you,” Mr. Judson began. “However, I need to start by asking each of you to take a moment to compare your letter with the person on either side. I suspect the language is the same, but should anyone have different wording, I’ll have to break you up into groups or something.” The delay seemed unnecessary to me as Mr. Judson had to know the letters were identical save the name following “Dear Mr. and/or Mrs.” However, I could understand why he might want to put off the typhoon of anger and invective likely to follow his translation of the legalese into what plainspoken fellows around town liked to call “reg’lar ‘merican.”

  The townsfolk took a few minutes to compare their letters with one another, noisily succumbing to the natural urge to liken Cyrus Dinkle, thereafter known as “Company,” to a jackass, a sidewinder, and a lousy weasel, the sum of those appellations unanimously agreed upon by those in attendance to be henceforth known as “Conniving Bastard.” Eventually, Mr. Judson borrowed Moderator Johns’s gavel, nearly beating a hole in the podium before everyone finally settled down.

  “Okay,” he went on, “does anyone have a letter that differs from his or her neighbor? Hold up your hand if you do.”

  No hands went up.

  “Good,” Mr. Judson said, quickly adding, “I don’t mean ‘good’ in that I’m pleased about your situations, just ‘good’ insofar as this meeting goes.”

  Mr. Judson went on, his voice indecisive, his entire manner uncharacteristically faint-hearted. I was surprised. The plan was going as we’d hoped. Dinkle had formally given notice of his intent to exchange the townspeople’s debts for their ambergris shares. He would receive his fraction of the dinosaur egg in the boathouse and our friends and neighbors would be made whole. It was exactly what we wanted and yet Mr. Judson seemed reluctant to reveal that Dinkle’s letters pulled everyone in the audience out of the holes they’d dug for themselves. Of course, he was simply acting, maintaining the ruse that he and Angus MacCallum and Mr. Johns and Miss Lizzie and Fiona and James and I were unaware of our empty boathouse. “Word will get back to Dinkle about this meeting,” he later told the Ambergrisians. “He has to believe we were as upset as the rest of the town…that we never looked inside the boathouse.”

  As those in attendance listened, Mr. Judson interpreted the letters they’d received and the contracts those letters referenced. He further informed them that Cyrus Dinkle had hornswoggled them.

  “I’m sorry to say that he legally owns your ambergris shares,” he revealed. “The contract is ironclad. You all signed an agreement requiring a written request for extension by the ninetieth day. That was yesterday. None of you made the request. That allows Dinkle to confiscate what you put up as collateral…In this case, your shares.”

  He paused, then added, “Again…I’m sorry.”

  The Ambergrisians had many times discussed this moment, all of us anticipating a barrage of “This ain’t right!” and “Not fair!” and “By God I’ll sue!” Instead, there was not a sound—no loud angry voices, no fists slammed into palms, no chairs crashing against the wall, no boots stomped against the floor. Just silence.

  “Perhaps I’ve not made myself clear,” Mr. Judson interjected.

  “We heard you,” Milton Garwood growled. He stood off to the side, his mood already dark on account of the meeting’s peremptory exclusion of monkeys. C. Herbert Judson’s pronouncement had done nothing to brighten his disposition and Milton dispensed with “thereins” and “hereafters” to succinctly say what everyone now knew to be the main thrust of the certified letters. “Dinkle has cheated us,” he said.

  The silence in the room slowly began to give way to a low rumble—not the distant and oddly elegant thunder before a storm but the ominous and angry murmurs that predict a lynching. Mr. Judson held up both hands.

  “Just a minute now,” he said, “from a purely legal standpoint you’ve not been cheated. Dinkle has complied with the terms of the contracts.”

  “Ain’t he supposed to give us notice or something before he forecloses?” someone called out.

  “Ordinarily true,” Mr. Judson said, “but you all waived that right. Look at page three, item seven, subheading eight.” This was followed by the rustle and flap of 190 papers being handled. It was just as Mr. Judson told them:

  3.7(8): Borrower waives right to prior notice preceding foreclosure by Company.

  There’s nothing like the door to a legal loophole being slammed shut to turn the murmur and hiss of discontent into a furious outcry, With alarming suddenness, the assembly room was filled with shouting and fist-shaking. People shouted at C. Herbert Judson. They shouted at each other. They shouted at Coach Wally Buford for being the damned nincompoop who encouraged them to sign Dinkle’s papers and Skitch Peterson who unfairly enticed them with a same day used car sale. Eventually they began to shout at the rest of us sitting at the front of the room: Mr. Johns, Miss Lizzie, Fiona, James. And me. I was just a kid, but they shouted at me, too, decrying the unsolicited streak of generosity I’d foisted on them, irrevocably shoving them int
o the promise of affluence against their wills.

  People stood, filling the air with yelling and pointed fingers. A bit of pushing and shoving went on between a few of the young bucks, the entire affair edging closer and closer to a melee. Ma put a hand on mine, as if doing so might shield me while Mr. Judson stood at the front, trying to be heard, and Mr. Johns retrieved his gavel from the lawyer and banged it on the podium. Miss Lizzie could usually shut people up with a narrow eye, but even she was no match for the anger coursing through the room. A single voice from the back of the assembly put an end to it.

  “CLAM UP!” Angus MacCallum bellowed. “PAT A CORK IN IT, ALL OF YE…JUS’ PAT A DAMNED CORK IN IT!”

  Angus slowly crab-walked his way up the center aisle, his crippled foot clip-clopping against the wooden floor like a horse’s hoof, the wrinkles of his mastiff’s face forming innumerable frowns. He reached the front and took the stage, standing between the crowd and the Ambergrisians. His voice had effectively silenced the mob as everyone figured Angus had pairs of socks older than most of them and had earned the right to speak his mind without being interrupted. More daunting, however, was the old Scot’s disposition. Despite his age we all knew Angus MacCallum to be a wolverine—small and ferocious and utterly fearless. No one wanted to back him into a corner, the congregation remaining silent as the old lighthouse keeper glared at them for a few moments before speaking.

  “I’d like to remind ye,” he began, pointing a finger at Coach Wally Buford, “tha’ only one person t’ought it a good idea to joomp aff’n a cliff and tha’ fat fellow dinnae have the backbone to sit up here at the froont and take his loomps. Ye wannae yell at a body, yell at Mister Wally Buford, ‘cuz I’m here to tell ya that noon o’ these fine people behind me is e’en a wee bit to blame. Herbert offered to look o’er yer papers. Roger said his bank would make sure it was all on the oop and oop. Both of ‘em advised ye to beg aff for a while…to t’ink t’ings o’er carefully before ye slapped yer John Hancocks on somethin’ ye dinnae understand. And as fer James and Miss Lizzie and Fiona and young Connor, why they had noothin’ to do wit’ yer choices. Ye made your own beds and have only yerselves to blame if the pillas are mussed. Ye cannae blame these folks up here. It wisna’ their doin’.”