Freebird

by John Raymond

  12

  They arrived at the bank half an hour before opening time and waited for the early teller to unlock the glass door. They could see her inside, a limping blond woman in a too-big pantsuit, turning on the lights, unlocking the teller stalls, then staring at a moni-tor and occasionally tapping a keyboard as if she was shopping for winter coats on Amazon. At last, with no particular regard for their schedule, she lumbered to the front and ushered them into the marble lobby.

  The manager kept them waiting a few more minutes in the soft chairs near the coffee machine, but when she emerged from her private glass encasement, she seemed genuinely excited to shake their hands. Her name was Jackie, and she was a sweet, squeaky-voiced black woman with giant pools of purple makeup around her eyes, almost to the level of a backup singer for Parliament. She examined Aaron’s grandfather’s key with great optimism. “This looks very promising, Mr. Singer! I think we might have something.” And with a quick, bustling wave to her staff, she ushered Aaron and his grandfather, the treasure hunters, down the stairs to the vault.

  Aaron had never seen a bank vault before, but, as with so many things, it was much like it was the movies. The door was a giant, round agglomeration of silver and gold discs and spokes, about the size of a car, and after Jackie entered a many-digit code, and a whisper of shifting pistons and cogs emanated through the steel sheath, it opened with the slightest touch. The room revealed was shadowless and clean, and without ceremony Jackie took them into the vault’s secret air.

  Lining the walls were many small, metal doors, more than Aaron could count, and he wondered what lay inside all of them. Deeds, diamonds, engagement rings, bracelets, tiaras, who knew? A thousand mysteries, a thousand life stories, with a thousand twists of fate, none of which were his concern this morning. His concern was only Grandpa Sam’s story, the gold that was the symbol of Grandpa Sam’s fate, not that Grandpa Sam himself seemed all that precious about it. He could be watering his lawn, he was so excited to be in the vault. At least Jackie, businesswoman that she was, had some energy. She stalked over to a far corner, crouched down, tucked her skirt into the crease of her bent legs, tilted her head, brushed her fingers over a row of faceplates, yanked on a handle, and withdrew the proper box, the proper mystery, and hauled it to the table in the center of the room for opening.

  There, Aaron’s grandpa fiddled with the key, unable to fit the teeth into the slit. His effort went on for a full two minutes before Jackie stepped in and inserted the key herself. The key turned, the lid popped open, and sitting inside were three rolls of coins.

  At first Aaron thought it was a bust. He’d been expecting something more spectacular—a pile of shining nuggets or a stack of glittering bars, something radiating actual cartoon bolts of brightness. But, judging from Jackie’s delighted squeal, these plain, brown rolls were more than acceptable. He watched as his grandpa lifted one of the rolls and stared, turning it end to end. The roll was the size of a candle, and at each butt the coins’ heads and tails were visible, and in these spots some of Aaron’s fantasy came true. The coins were indeed gold in the most ridiculous way—gold like butterscotch, gold like the gold nuggets in a fairy tale, gold like the gleaming gold coins in a leprechaun’s pot. Jackie was so pleased by the sight of the goldness that she clucked like a hen. Aaron’s grandpa allowed himself a resigned smile of victory.

  Jackie had a scale brought in, and they weighed the rolls and found the coins added up to twenty ounces, placing the worth somewhere in the region of twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars, depending on the day and the buyer. Twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars, compressed into these three slim cylinders of krugerrands. The gold had no use, exactly. It couldn’t cure cancer or improve your boner strength. So why did men and women love gold? This was a question for the ages.

  “This is quite a day!” Jackie said.

  “I suppose it is,” Grandpa Sam said.

  “Your grandpa is a real card,” Jackie said, pinching Grandpa Sam’s shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Aaron said. “I guess so.”

  Next came picture time. One of the tellers, grinning and clutching her smartphone to her chest, was already lurking near the vault door, and she asked Aaron and Grandpa Sam and Jackie to stand for a few portraits. They arranged themselves in a line, Aaron’s grandfather sandwiched in the middle with the gold, and smiled effortfully for the bank’s e-newsletter. Then Aaron’s grandpa signed the releases allowing him to take his property and also allowing his picture to be used for press purposes in the bank’s e-newsletter, after which they shook hands with Jackie a few more times and climbed the stairs back up to the marble lobby.

  “You’re sure you want to close your account?” Jackie said as they reached the brass door to Broadway, during the warm goodbyes. “We’ve done a good job for you so far, Mr. Singer. Safe and sound.”

  “That’s true,” Grandpa Sam said. “But I need to bring this home now. Thank you very much.”

  “What about some insurance? I could draw up the papers right now.”

  “I just want to get home now, thank you.”

  “Your grandfather is a good guy, Aaron,” Jackie said, opening the door. “You should listen to this guy.”

  “Oh, I do,” Aaron said. “Sometimes.”

  The rolls went into a pouch his grandfather had brought expressly for the purpose of transportation. It was a purple velveteen pouch with gold, tasseled drawstrings and the words “Crown Royal” embroidered on the side. The pouch had been in his grandfather’s possession for somewhere around a decade, awaiting some use. With the pouch safely tucked inside Grandpa Sam’s fanny pack, they exited into the Oakland morning and belted themselves into the car to start home.

  They retraced their way through the maze of cloverleaves, barreling between the noise-dampening freeway walls and zooming past the mysterious townships of San Leandro and Hayward, the pristine, white visage of the Mormon temple in Oakland Hills, bearing witness to their triumph.

  To anyone else, Aaron’s grandfather might have looked kind of depressed, hunched in the passenger seat, but Aaron was beginning to understand something about his emotional postures. His grandpa’s shoulders may have been rounded, his head bowed toward his chest, but his hands were full of action, fiddling constantly with the soft bag in his lap. His fingers twisted the cords, retracted, lay still for a moment in their normal resting position, only to creep back and start massaging the bag again. For Aaron’s grandpa, this passed for an expression of near euphoria.

  The mood got even wilder as they continued east, and Grandpa Sam leaned forward in his seat to read the whizzing signs. Aaron had never seen his grandpa so fully engaged. He grumbled, not unhappily, as the clusters of fast-food restaurants wheeled by in his vision, to the degree that he almost seemed to be searching for something out there, but of course he didn’t say what. That would have been too much, even for this extraordinary mood.

  “You need anything, Grandpa?” Aaron asked. “A bathroom? We can stop.”

  “No. No. I don’t need anything. I’m fine, Aaron, thank you.”

  The exit to Hayward approached, and Grandpa Sam’s squinting and muttering started up again, fading as the overpasses and distant traffic signals receded. They were already leaving the dense Bay Area suburbia and entering arid pastureland, the hills sprouting copses of oak trees and occasional power stations and isolated homesteads, the sky dramatically enlarging.

  “You’re sure?” Aaron said. “Pretty soon there won’t be anything for a long time.”

  “No,” his grandpa said, fingering the tassels, but when the freeway merged with the traffic from San Jose and expanded to six lanes, he changed his mind.

  “I think we should stop soon, for lunch,” he said.

  “Lunch?” Aaron said. “Now? Really?” The dashboard said 11:00, which meant they’d been driving for a grand total of fifteen minutes. They’d only just gotten up to speed. Aaron was of a mind to keep pushing. A bathroom pit stop, sure, but lunch?

 
; “Yes,” his grandpa confirmed. “I’d like to stop now.”

  “How about a Clif bar?” Aaron asked.

  “No. I want to go to the place from yesterday. I told Kari we’d show her what we found.”

  With this revelation, Aaron’s reluctance edged into outright mutiny. Breaking stride just to visit that girl, Kari, who’d surely already forgotten they existed, was stupid, and he definitely didn’t want to eat another meal at her restaurant. A much better plan, by his estimation, would be to keep going and pull over in Bakersfield or somewhere like that and find an amazing Mexican place. But, glancing over at his grandpa’s slumping girth, he let go of his reservations. So his grandfather wanted to stop and show off his gold to a pretty girl. Why not? How often did this silly, frivolous side of Grandpa Sam get exercised? And who deserved a victory lap more than his genocide-surviving grandpa? Truly, what was the point of reclaiming the batch of gold you’ve stashed away for decades if not to impress a girl at the Bagel Café?

  Aaron barely had time to peel off the freeway into the citadel of Dublin. Entering from this side, it was all the more obvious what an exurban outpost it was, the last, mirrored extrusion of Bay Area yuppie-dom, at least for the moment. They cruised past the Oracle building and the other anonymous office-park complexes, heading toward the tracts of McMansions marching over the golden hills ahead. At the light, they turned into the nowfamiliar strip mall and coasted into a spot near the diner.

  Kari was not at the counter this morning, but Grandpa Sam wasn’t dissuaded. He pressed his belly to the glass case and asked for her by name, and he was rewarded with an obligatory search in the back room. A minute later Kari emerged from the kitchen, looking slightly put out.

  “Oh,” she said. “You guys.”

  “How are you this morning, my dear?” said Grandpa Sam, with an almost Old World decorum. He enunciated his words and held his posture as erectly as his depleted bones could manage. Within his limits, he almost seemed to perform a courtly bow.

  “Did you guys forget something, or something?” she said with the look of a sad, tired Scottie dog. She was a beefy woman, with a flat perm that fell around her cheeks like drooping ears and eyes that were pinched with an expression of enduring, halfcomprehended pain. “’Cause I didn’t find anything, if you did.”

  “We only stopped to show you something, that’s all,” said Grandpa Sam. “I told you the reason we were driving to Oakland yesterday. Do you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, come here, Kari. I want to show you something.”

  His grandfather shuffled over to an empty table and pulled out the purple bag, holding his hand half inside the soft mouth until Kari joined him. As she peered down, her sullen expression shifted into a look of mild interest, mixed with some irritation.

  “We went to the bank this morning,” Grandpa Sam said. “I think I told you, I hadn’t been to this bank in over forty years. And we had a very successful visit. Yes, we did. We went into the vault, and the key I had fit into the box. I don’t think Aaron could believe it. Could you believe it, Aaron?”

  “Nope.”

  “And this is what we found, Kari.” Without any flourish—he was not a man of flourishes—he pulled the three cylinders from his bag and pressed them to the table, rolling them out like a fan. Kari leaned forward with another uptick of interest.

  “That’s gold?” she said. “For real?”

  “Gold,” he said. “Yes.”

  For a few seconds, Kari scrutinized the precious metal with something like reverence. She picked up one of the rolls of coins and hefted it in her palm, inspecting the edge of the brown paper sheath where it revealed the glowing metal. For a moment the rest of the world, the restaurant, all its smells and noise, seemed to exit from her mind, and she stared like a girl at the golden princess doll of her dreams.

  “Heavy.”

  “It’s gold,” Aaron’s grandpa said. “Gold is heavy.”

  “How much is it worth?”

  “How much would you guess, Kari?” He was very pleased by the impression his show-and-tell was making. He was ready to keep playing the game with her as long as she’d stick with it.

  “You’re gonna make me guess?” she said.

  “Go ahead. Please. Guess.”

  She started by guessing five hundred dollars. Aaron found the guess slightly moronic, but then again, thinking it over, he realized that only two hours ago he might well have made the same guess himself. It didn’t look like that much gold, after all, three little rolls, and if a person had never seen real gold and had no idea how much gold was worth, how was that person supposed to know? His grandpa chuckled, shaking his head, pleased by the low-ball stab.

  “More than that,” he said.

  Next she guessed five thousand dollars, a reasonable tenfold jump, and from there she crawled upward in thousand-dollar increments. By the time she landed on twenty-five thousand dollars, Aaron’s grandpa was partly delighted, partly disgusted she’d taken so long. But he hadn’t enjoyed so much attention from a young woman since the days he’d first stuffed the gold into the box.

  “I told you I’d show you what we found,” he said, carefully packing the gold back into his pouch. “I’ve had this gold a very long time, Kari. A very long time. A person should always have a little gold in their possession. You never know what might happen. You should remember that. Will you?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, and disinterest again veiled her eyes. Anything smacking of grandfatherly advice, of useful advice in any category, was not going to find purchase with her, Aaron could tell. She was a person who’d made a life of rejecting whatever good advice might come her way.

  “So, you guys eating lunch here?” she said, a beleaguered waitress again. “Or you’re probably going out for steaks, huh?”

  Zipping up his pack, Grandpa Sam looked over the dining room, examining the many empty seats. Among them was the very booth they’d sat in the day before, and Aaron could see the prospect was tempting. To fall into a routine so far from home? How enticing. Two mediocre lunches in a row? Absolutely, yes. How else might he know exactly what was coming in the hour ahead?

  “Yes,” his grandpa said imperiously. “We’ll eat here, yes.”

  Kari waited for Aaron to confirm the decision, but he just shrugged. This was Grandpa Sam’s day. And, holding his bag against his waist, his grandfather started for their booth, Kari falling in behind, grabbing menus, and Aaron silently falling in, too. It was only 11:10, but once again, if this was what his grandpa wanted, so be it. And maybe they could still make it home by dinner this way.

  The lunch crowd was starting to come in, and Aaron felt as though he recognized a few of them from the day before. He also noticed that the waitresses and busboys seemed to be paying them more attention this time. They slowed down a little as they glided past their table, smiling, watching them out of the corners of their eyes. The news of their payload had obviously traveled and conferred on them the mantle of honored guests. Extra bread and butter appeared. Kari came around, filling their water glasses whenever they hit the halfway point. So this is what money brings you, he thought. Service.

  His grandpa didn’t seem to notice the stepped-up attention. Having completed his mission and fulfilled his promise, he was happy to sink back into his regular languor. Out the window, the sun-baked parking lot beguiled him, and occasionally he touched the drawstrings of his bag to remind himself it was indeed still there. When the food arrived, he placed the bag beside his plate like a sleeping hamster and proceeded to slurp his tomato soup, picking up specks of tomato in his mustache and looking more and more exhausted by the spoonful. The pleasure of his reunion with the gold had burned him out, and the slack turtle face was returning.

  Aaron, for his part, entertained himself by ogling the waitress in the next section. She was a fairly generic, sorority-type blond, probably a lover of Pink and the Black Eyed Peas, but something about her willowy body and small, pert breasts was almost cruell
y arousing. Her fine, broad shoulders and sweet, full, athletic ass, displayed almost pornographically in the binding black polyester pants bunching up in her panty line, oppressed him. From the way the outline of her nipples kept appearing and disappearing against the thin weight of her blouse, she probably wasn’t wearing a bra, either.

  At moments she almost seemed to sense Aaron’s eyes on her, but if so, it made her only more flagrant in her bendings and reachings. Aaron watched as she leaned over to pour water, craning her neck, on the lookout for more glasses, bathed softly in the light of the Bagel Café’s bay windows. Her skin was flushed; her lips were glossed. Before the plates had been cleared, as his grandfather drizzled the last spoonfuls of soup into his mouth, she passed near enough that Aaron could smell her, a breeze of clean, floral Calvin Klein scent, at which point he had to excuse himself and head for the bathroom to masturbate.

  Happily, the diner bathroom was private. He sat down on the toilet seat and unzipped his pants, the image of the waitress’s ass still seared on his lids. For a few minutes he tried to fabricate some kind of storyline to bring his fantasy to fuller effect, imagining the girl as his girlfriend, waiting for him after work in the parking lot, or in a car, or in the shadowy booths, but in the end he set the fantasy in the very bathroom where he was sitting. He visualized himself opening the door and finding her waiting, the embarrassed shuffle between them, the accidental, grazing touch, the sudden, inexplicable overflow of lust. He imagined the fuzz of her pubic hair against his fingers, the wetness of her slit, the pliant give of those delicate buttocks, and jerked harder.

  About fifteen minutes later, he exited the bathroom with his hands freshly washed and his shirt tucked deeply into his waistline. He would have been out much sooner, but due to an unfortunate accident on the hem of his T-shirt, he’d ended up taking more time than expected, pawing at himself with damp paper towels and drying off under the hand blower, all to limited effect. The tuck-in was not a cool look, but he didn’t much care. He wasn’t going to see anyone he knew driving with his grandfather down I-5 today.