by Hob Broun
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Your wife.”
“No shit. Where you at?”
“Still New York.”
“So how’s it goin’ up there, baby? That dude findin’ any work for you?”
“Finding work? I don’t …” Some line Christo must’ve given him the night they left; she couldn’t remember. “No, it’s been mostly window shopping and bar hopping, Karl. Not much news to tell. It’s only, I don’t know, I wanted to hear your voice and make sure you were getting by all right is all.”
“Well, ain’t you some sweetness. Tell ya, I been shaky some, but then I just sit still and talk to you out loud like you was right here and it calms me down. You always say the right things. And I know you would too if you was really here. See, while you been bar hoppin’, ole Karl’s been all sober. Ain’t had even one drop since you left. How ’bout that?”
“You’re serious, aren’t you.”
“Yes indeed. Like to drown in sweat the first couple days. But ain’t I makin’ that effort? I’m tryin’ to be a good boy for you, so why can’t you come back home?”
“I will, you know I will. Just not right now.”
“But I need some reward. Even a trained seal when he does his stuff right, they give him a fish. I can’t be doin’ like you want me to all on my own. You got to throw me a few fish about now.”
“I love you Karl and I’m glad I called. Don’t make me regret it.”
“Well, I’d sure like to know what it is up there that’s keepin’ you.”
“So would I.”
“Then why don’t you cut loose and come on down for the weekend. We’ll go up to Tampa and eat crabs and get rowdy.”
“Sounds good, and we’ll do it. Just not right now.”
“It’s just I been missin’ you so hard.”
“I know. Let me tell you where I’m at in case you need to call.”
Karl couldn’t find paper, so he wrote on his hand in ink. “I been thinkin’ all about you. See, it’s like that old song, baby. You’re the queen of my heart … Baby?”
He was talking to an empty line.
Tildy looked all around, everything so neat and squared off, like a dentist’s waiting room. There was a draft and the surfaces of furniture were cold. She cried without moving her face.
Down at the other end of the hall, ice motes oozed through septums and blood pumped thick from triphammer hearts.
9
WARM RAYS FILTERING THROUGH pine boughs fell at the edge of the marl pit where Ondray Keyes sat holding the last half inch of a cigarette between fingernails, trying to catch a last puff or two without burning himself. His shirt was buttoned to the throat, the collar turned up. It had been chilly all morning, icy dew on his bare feet as he ran to the outhouse, fog on the pop bottles.
A brown bird fluttered out of the scrubwood behind him. It hovered a moment, dive-bombed the pit, skimming over weed-choked water, then floated up into high branches across the way. Ondray kept his eye on the small shape, knowing that if he looked away for only a second he’d lose it in the leaf shadows. He slapped one eye shut and aimed through the clear, soft air. Hook that finger round the trigger, take a breath and hold it steady, then squeeze. Pop. Ondray was saving up to get a BB rifle.
He flipped the cigarette end, hardly more than a coal by now, into the water and walked back to the culvert by the road where he’d hidden his bicycle. He brushed dirt off the seat and adjusted the playing cards clothes-pinned to the rear spokes (they made a bad motor-buzzing sound when the wheel spun). Once he’d climbed on, Ondray unwrapped three sticks of bubblegum and wadded them together before filling his cheek. The flavor went so fast. Then he put his small weight on the pedals and took off down the crown of the road, alert for any gleam in the weeds.
Maybe ride all the way to the big highway. Maybe see what’s doing over at that Mr. Gables’ house.
Karl answered the door holding a blue towel around his waist. “Ondray, my little pal. What you doin’, son?”
“What you doin’?”
“Standin’ here gettin’ my butt cold. Come on in here so’s I can close the door.”
Ondray moved slowly, sucking on his pink wad. “You sleep all day, man,” he said. It was not a question.
“I was up late. Wife called me again from New York last night. Had to sit down and make some plans, you know, stuff I gotta be doin’. A few deals I want to be on top of when she gets back.” Karl grinned woozily and padded toward the bedroom. “Put some clothes on and I’ll be right out. Should be a Coke in the fridge if you’re thirsty.”
“Can I keep the bottle?”
“Sure, go ahead. Collectin’ ’em are you?”
“That’s what we be doin’ most every mornin’, me and my brother. And splittin’ the money half and half.”
“So that was Earvin I seen the other day snoopin’ along by here with a gunnysack?”
“Coulda been.” Ondray pulled open the big white door and found the Coke next to a bowl of something that had fur growing on it. “Coulda been,” he said, parking his gum by the sink before drinking.
“That’s real good. You boys got some enterprise.” Karl emerged in pants and a Louisiana Tech sweatshirt, sat at the kitchen table with socks and sneakers in hand. “If you’d told me before, I woulda been savin’ all my empties for you. That’s some enterprise all right.”
“No, uh-uh. We just be findin’ ’em, that’s all.” Draining the bottle, he jammed it neck first in the back pocket of his dungarees.
“So it’s all in the huntin’. Right. All in the huntin’.” Karl hummed experimentally while preparing his morning meal: instant coffee and crushed aspirin mixed with hot water from the tap. “You know those ads in the magazines that say ‘your song poems wanted.’ I was thinkin’ I might take a swing at it. Whatta you think, Ondray, you think I could get a hit record?”
Ondray shrugged, replaced his wad.
“Okay, but you might hear my words comin’ out a juke box sometime. They’re lookin’ for new blood, you know. New ideas.”
“You gonna eat this banana?”
Ignoring him, Karl peered out the window. “Guess it’s a nice day out there,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Maybe you and me could do some huntin’ on a day like this.”
“We finished that up already and Earvin done went home to eat. He like that fish head soup.”
“No, see what I had in mind … Lizard huntin’. Remember a couple years ago how we went lizard huntin’ right out back here in the slough. Caught some big ones, too, and my wife tied pieces of thread on ’em so you could walk ’em up and back like on a leash. Remember? We got awful muddy, both of us. And you were just a little scrap back then, looked like a piece of devil’s-food cake with the frosting all mussed. But we sure had a time of it. Nice kinda day to do it again. We could go right now if you want.”
Ondray’s mouth was filled with banana so he answered by angling his head and wandering toward the door. Nothing much else to do that he could think of.
Karl walked in front. He wore his painter’s cap and carried a shoe box and a couple of glass jars. Ondray scuffed along after him, eating a jelly sandwich. As they reached the trees, Karl cautioned him about making noise. A hunter, he said, had to move as softly as a breeze. They walked several minutes through thick woods with clouds of gnats hanging over their heads. A bread crust slipped from Ondray’s fingers and tiny brown ants instantly swarmed on it. He bent down to watch them.
Karl, who’d gone ahead, came thrashing back through stalks and saplings. “Come on, we got to stay together out here,” he said urgently. “You can’t tell what might be lurkin’ around.”
“Sure, man.”
The trees thinned out and the ground became uneven, exposed roots and grassy little hummocks. A smell of warm rot reached them.
“Couldn’t get me out here by night at the wrong end of a gun,” Karl said. “That’s when the swamp cats come out and big bears’d tear your head clean off w
ith one swipe.”
“Ain’t no bears,” Ondray said impatiently.
Up ahead, light hit the stagnant water like a fist.
“There’s snakes though. They good to eat.”
Karl moved back out of the sun. Sweat was dripping down his neck and water had begun to seep through his sneakers. The coffee was pressing at the neck of his bladder but he didn’t want to let it out. He had this crazy thought that if he took his cock out, some creature would jump up and take a bite out of it. Crazy. But every time he’d reach for that zipper, he’d imagine what they’d feel like, those little wet teeth, and it was so real his stomach would drop. Hey. Settle down now.
He was duckwalking by the edge of a puddle flecked with scum when he saw one and froze. A black salamander with yellow spots. It was basking with eyes closed and forefeet just touching the water. Karl balanced, set his weight back on his heels, moved his open hand very slowly until it was directly over the target, and then he swooped. Mud and water in his fist and, yes, a little something cold and wriggling, a dark head emerging from between his fingers. He felt behind him for the jar, fascinated by the struggling movements, the shiny jaws widening. He thought he heard a tiny squeak and then there was a new sensation, something warm. He loosened his grip, looked. In his excitement he had squeezed so hard that the salamander’s belly had ruptured and its purplish viscera were all over his palm.
Karl flung the body away, churned his hand in the water, wiped it on the grass. And then he stopped. Ondray was gone and he was completely alone in the cruel emptiness and heat of the slough. Here it came again, that panic of broad daylight that he knew well enough to recognize at its first shifty approach. The trees closed off his route of escape and the sun descended on him from above.
He wanted to call for Ondray but his throat would open only for the thinnest stream of air. No sound came out. His head felt like a sponge full of wet plaster. If he’d had the strength he might have dug a safe hole in the earth. But all Karl could do was curl up in the mud and pray his lungs and heart would keep working.
“Man, you funny. You come out here to sleep.”
“God almighty but I told you. Don’t you ever walk off and leave me that way. I told you we had to stay together.”
“Yeah, okay. But be cool, jes be cool.” Ondray backed up, alarmed by the wild-eyed mudman who wavered toward him. “I found some good stuff back in them reeds.”
He held up his collecting jar; it was filled with clear jelly speckled black.
“What the hell?”
“Frog eggs.”
“You little bastard.”
“Good stuff. These don’t die on the way, I be farmin’ frogs.”
Karl recovered with an ice pack and some afternoon teevee. His favorite show came on at three, I Married Joan (“What a girl, what a whirl, what a life!”) with Joan Davis and Jim Backus as Brad.
Joan Davis was no stunner. She had a big nose, almost no chin and a rubbery face that could have been a man’s. But there was something about her that brought the heat to Karl’s balls. He would picture her sprawled across a bed, skirt up around her waist. Conical tits, legs and arms so thin, so helpless. He imagined himself pushing them here and there like a doll’s, grasping that helmet of glossy blond hair and pulling her face close to his. He lay back on the sofa and masturbated, thinking of Joan Davis, of Tildy, of a little girl who let him pee into her hands in third grade; and at the end, as usual, he thought of Jerry Apache’s wife in the emergency room, her dirty sandals and red toenails, her face distorted with grief, tears and mucus running, her knees buckling as she slid down the white tiled wall and fell in a heap on the floor.
He ejected his semen onto a torn magazine. Just as quickly he began to recede. That moment’s appeasement faded into the slack afternoon; his nerves twitched, frantic for something more, and went numb. A droplet fell from his deflated penis, cold and gray on the edge of his thigh.
He reached behind him for distraction, pulling old issues of Rockhound, Prospector’s World, and True Treasure Tales from the tumbling pile in the corner. He knew parts of them by heart, favorite passages he would reread at times of dejection like verses from the Bible. Ah yes, here was the one about the man who discovered a 28-carat diamond while pitching horseshoes with his nephew. There was inspiration in these yellowed pages. All things were possible. One revelatory moment, a fast dig in the right piece of ground, was all it took to turn your life around. Rebirth. Rebirth as a man of means.
Opening a three-year-old copy of True Treasure Tales, Karl looked at the pictures and read the advertisements. Then he found an article in the back which, after hurrying through the first few paragraphs, he could not remember having ever seen before. It was written by someone called J. Frank Robey (Former NYPD Consultant). The title was “Jazzman’s Fortune.”
… The diminutive, hunchbacked Webb overcame his handicaps and went on to become one of the premier jazz drummers of his era. Connoisseurs of Negro music still speak in tones of awe about the great bands he led in the 20’s and 30’s at the Savoy Ballroom in New York’s Harlem. Many famous musicians graduated from Webb’s band and made names for themselves elsewhere. Included among these would be Ella Fitzgerald, the great vocalist who’s still making records today and who, as a shy orphan from Baltimore, debuted with Webb’s band in the early 30’s.
Unlike many jazzmen of the time who squandered their money on cars, clothes, liquor, and fast women, Chick Webb was a shrewd businessman who made sound investments and managed them carefully. So it was that shortly after his death, the Harlem rumor mill was alive with stories of a fortune in cash and jewels secreted somewhere in Webb’s sumptuous townhouse. Mounted police were called in on several occasions to control wild mobs trying to break into the property. Over the next few years amateur treasure hunters, as well as some out-and-out criminals, tore the place apart, but nothing of significance was ever found.
The end of the story? Maybe not. Says one-time nightclub owner Dixie Diggs, “Chick sank a lot of money into real estate. He was ahead of his time. He had buildings all over Harlem. Sugar Hill, Morningside Heights. There could be a floor safe or a secret room in one of those places that nobody’s stumbled on yet.”
But what are the chances that the treasure ever really existed? Is it only a myth? A relic of that tumultuous period in our history when the nation’s heart beat in Swing time and men and women danced all night to forget their worries? Dixie Diggs thinks not.
“Chick was always pretty tight with a dollar. It would have been just like him to stash his dough where no one could find it.”
Naturally, Webb’s real estate holdings have long since passed into other hands and tracing them would be a difficult task. But then, who ever said treasure hunting was easy! Maybe that floor safe or secret room is still waiting to be discovered. With some careful research and a little luck, the jazzman’s fortune may yet be found.
New York. A city that big must be full of hidden treasures, and Tildy, who wouldn’t know where to look, had gone without him. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the New York he knew from the movies—blinding neon, overflowing sidewalks. And thousands upon thousands of buildings. It would take a lifetime to search even half of them. Was it really all in the hunting?
Karl went back to the beginning and tracked the story again. He was so absorbed in this second reading that he barely heard the rapping at the door and the rattle of the knob.
“Yo. Yo in there.”
Karl fastened his pants, peeked through the curtains at a man in a polyester suit who turned to one side as he lit a brown cigarette. He straightened, flicking the dead match away, and Karl saw his tense face, with bits of green toilet paper pasted over shaving cuts. He looked too nervous and shaggy to be much of a threat. Probably had the wrong address anyway. Karl puffed himself up and opened the door.
“Karl Gables,” the man said, reading from a slip of paper.
“You’re lookin’ at him.”
“I’d
like to speak with your wife, Karl. Is she around?”
“No sir, she ain’t.”
“That is her car parked over there, license number 5Y 213?”
“But she ain’t in it.”
The man smiled abruptly and one of the paper bits dropped off his chin. “What it is, I’m a friend of Tildy’s. I’m associated with her employer, the Seminole Star Corporation of Jacksonville. I’d like to come in and ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. Get a few things cleared up.”
Karl looked at the heavy gold chain around his neck and the grime on his shirt cuffs. “You got a business card or something?”
“Gee, you know I’m fresh out. But I really am a good friend of your wife’s. I know her well enough to tell you she likes mustard on a baked potato.”
“Yeah, okay. That’s good enough,” Karl said, stepping back.
“Fine. Great. Just a few minutes’ conversation, I mean I’m not going to screw up your day, Karl. And I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a bottle of six-year-old bourbon in my car. Good thing to carry when you spend as much time in motels as I do, know what I mean? We’ll have a couple of nips and I’m sure the time will pass quite pleasantly for both of us, okay?”
“Yeah, why not. I’ll get some glasses.”
The visitor was back a minute later with the bottle. He shopped the chairs in the room, chose one, and filled Karl’s glass. “Actually, I think I’ll hold off a couple minutes till I get my breath back. Been humping all around trying to find this place.”
“We like it out here.” Karl sucked bourbon fumes through his nose, upended the glass. “Real mellow. You carry good whiskey…. Say, I don’t even know your name.”
Settling deeper into his chair the visitor removed a leatherette memo book and a mechanical pencil from his breast pocket. “They call me Buck, and so can you.”
“Thanks, Buck. How about a refill?”
“No problem.” The visitor filled Karl’s glass three quarters full this time, still poured nothing for himself. “Is Tildy going to be here later? Are you expecting her at any special time?”
