"Or more modest."
We went on like that until we were tired, then we found we didn't want to drive back to the Sixties Nest. Didn't want to sleep on a cold back porch with butane in our snouts. We got some beer and some cheap wine and rented a room at a rundown motel and stayed up most of the night telling lies and a few sad truths that we hoped the other would think were lies.
Leonard talked about his grandmother, and how fine she was, how he loved her, then talked about his dad, who beat him until he was fourteen and he turned on the old man and kicked his ass, and the old man went away and never came back and his mother died of diabetes and shattered dreams. A stint in the army seemed all right to him. He didn't talk about Vietnam. He skipped that part, and of course I'd heard it all before and he knew it, but a drunk doesn't care about what's been said before, he cares about now and how he feels, dragging that stuff up is like putting on a good old blues song you've heard a hundred times. You know the words, but it still does you good.
He moved on to other things. Sad history became glad lies. He talked about his dogs, about this one—long gone to her reward, of course—that was smart as Lassie. Could jump through hoops and run for help. Another glass of wine and he might have told me how she could drive a car and smoke a cigar, maybe work a couple calculus problems.
But it didn't get that far. He got limp and paused too long and I told him how I'd lost some plans. About how the future that was now was not the future I'd wanted. He listened good, like he always did, and what I said was all right. He was with me on that, knew this line of patter, nodded knowingly in all the right places, way I had with his much-heard story about his good grandmother and his runaway father and his dead mother. Then I told him about Trudy and Cheep, sneaked it in like an inside curve ball. I was looking for a little sympathy there. Figured I deserved it.
"You dick," Leonard said, "I told you that bitch was poison. Paco told you. Everyone knows what she is but the guys in love with her. Maybe I wasn't queer I'd love her too. But from my perspective, she's just a bitch with some patter, and you're an A-one jackass that can't tell a hard-on from true, sweet love. Goodnight."
The thing I like best about Leonard is his sensitivity. Tell you one thing, though, I'd listened to his last goddamn dog story cum lie. He could tell it to the bushes.
Next morning, dull-eyed and slick-tailed, we drove out to the Sixties Nest, ready to deliver our news.
Chapter 18
After we told them what we found, it took two days to get everything together, make a few plans. They gathered up chainsaws and axes and brush knives and an aluminum boat, and somehow Howard talked his boss into letting him borrow the wrecker for a Sunday afternoon.
His boss must have found him considerably more charming than Leonard and I did. At my worst, I wouldn't have pissed on him had he been on fire, and at my best, I would have stomped the flames out.
So we went down there on a cold-as-hell Sunday, the sky all funny-looking and threatening rain, and we took the tools and cut a path for the wrecker to get down to the creek bank. It wasn't much of a path, but by cutting a tree now and then and chopping out some undergrowth, the wrecker, one of those big things with monster tires, was able to get through. We put out a few fishing poles here and there as a disguise, but I thought that was damn silly. Anyone came along and saw all the work we'd done to get that wrecker in, saw our wet suits, and believed we were just dropping a few lines off cane poles was going to have to be a lot dumber than a stone.
Still, that's what we did. All of us but Paco. He was gone as he often was, and nobody offered an explanation, and I couldn't have cared less.
I girded my loins and prepared to put on the dry suit. I didn't want to go back down there, but I knew if I didn't, Leonard would, and I couldn't let him do it just because I was a chickenshit. Not that I hadn't considered it. He offered, and it was tempting, but I made it clear the first round was my baby. My dad always said that if something scared you, thing to do was to face it head-on. Saved yourself a lot of sleepless nights that way. Course, it was an attitude that might get you killed. I wondered if dear old Dad had considered that possibility.
I rubbed myself down with the grease and pulled on the suit and took hold of the wrecker's hook and cable and went down to the edge of the water.
Leonard came over, said, "Sure you want to do this?"
"Course not."
"But you're gonna?"
"Yep."
"Get in any kind of trouble, I'll come get you."
"How you going to know if I'm in trouble?"
"I won't let you stay down long, oxygen tanks or not. You don't come up pretty quick, I'll go down there and get your ass."
"I know that's your favorite part, Leonard, but bring the rest of me up with it.''
"Deal."
I pulled the mask down and Howard let out some slack on the cable. I went into the water, swam directly toward the suck hole. It obliged by dragging at me, and I went with it. It was as dark as before down there, and just as cold, and I had to work not to get tangled in the cable. A mild feeling of panic moved over me, but I put my mind on my business and swam with the current. It wasn't as bad this time. I could feel the pressure of the cold against me, but I must have gotten myself greased better this time or my suit put on tighter, because no water was seeping in.
When I was in the suck hole, I turned with my feet up and felt to see what had given up the license plate. It sure felt like a car bumper. I ran my gloved hands over it some more. Yes sir, what we had here was a genuine automobile. I got the hook attached by feel, hoped it was secure, grabbed the cable, and followed it up rapidly. I took only a few seconds, but when I broke the surface, I felt as if I had been down forever.
Howard got the winch going. It whined and pulled taut, paused, started whining again. Before long our catch broke the surface. I couldn't tell what color it had once been, because it had long since adopted the gray and green of the creek bottom's mud and mold. The rear window was mostly busted out, and what glass was there was flimsy-looking, as if it were not glass at all, but crinkled plastic. The tires looked like black chamois rags wrapped around the wheels. The windows were down, to help it sink no doubt, and water and mud the texture of a sick man's shit rushed out of them.
When it was on the bank, we gathered around it.
"It's a car," Howard said, "but is it the right car?"
"Softboy said he had some partners," I said. "Check for bones."
Time and fish would have long since taken care of any bodies in the car. Bones might have washed off or been carried away by larger fish, but if the car had gone into that suck hole and lodged there early on, just maybe they had been preserved. And if not, there might be some other evidence there that would tie the car to Softboy.
The doors wouldn't open, so Howard got a bar and went to work. When he popped them, mud oozed out. Trudy and Howard got shovels and started scraping. It wasn't too long before Howard found a skull. It was caked with mud and slime. He wiped it on his sleeve until we could see that it had a large hole in the left side and a smaller one in the right.
Trudy dug around in the backseat until she came up with another mud-covered skull. She brought it out on her shovel and Howard took hold of it and scrubbed it with his sleeve. This one had a small hole in the forehead, and at the back, one the size of a fist.
"I got a feeling Softboy lied about his partners," Leonard said. "Those are close-up shots. Small one's the entry wound, big one's the exit. I think he finished them himself. Money'll make you do things."
"He didn't seem that way," Howard said.
"Well, things aren't always what they seem," Leonard said.
"One thing, though," Howard said. "He told the truth about the car. And you know what that could mean."
We had the fever then. I tried to figure where Softboy might have wrecked the boat, and decided the best thing to do was to check both sides of the bridge in the deeper water, see What we could come up with. Leonard and
I took turns going in. It was surprisingly deep on either side of the bridge and I thought maybe they had dredged there, preparing to dig the great waterway that never happened.
We swam along the bottom, and at first we panicked at everything we touched. Some of it was the usual garbage: cans and bottles and plastic containers that had once housed soaps or colas, all manner of crap that belonged at the dump and not in the water. Sometimes there were big things and we hooked the winch cable to them and Howard hauled them out. There were a number of fifty-five-gallon drums full of who knows what, and tires and wheels, the occasional transmission or lawn mower, and of course the ever popular irregular-shaped rock.
No boats. No pieces of boat.
I was less fearful of the water now, and I tried to keep that in mind. Overconfidence is the way to give your soul to the devil an inch at a time. The dry suit was pinching me some. Water was starring to seep in, and I could really feel the cold. We dove and we dove, and by late afternoon I was exhausted.
We had found neither money nor boat nor boat pieces, and Leonard and I came out of the water and out of our drippy suits and dressed in our clothes for a little warmth and a break. Paco showed up with sandwiches and coffee, and he and Howard went off down the bank to talk about something or another.
The money fever was fading. I thought about how long ago the boat had gone down, and all that could have happened to it over the years, and a mild depression moved in. If it had broken up when it wrecked, it might have gradually been carried away, and the money with it. It could have long since made the sea.
Trudy had been ignoring me. She was about her business of sorting through the junk we'd pulled up, hoping to find some overlooked fragment that might resemble a boat. I couldn't help but watch her, way she moved was tantalizing.
There was this mound of dirt and vines and scraggly growth not far from the water's edge, and she took a break and went to lean on it, and the way she leaned, with her pelvis thrust forward, put a pain in both my heart and my groin. And I think she damn well knew it.
She shifted her hips without looking at me, making it seem pretty natural, but not quite, and suddenly she moved away from the mound and put her hand to the small of her back and rubbed, then reached out and rubbed at what had poked her. "This looks like a bone," she said to no one in particular.
I went over and could see the edge of something poking through the mound of dirt. It looked more like a rock to me, but even if it was a woolly mammoth bone, I wasn't greatly in the mood for paleontology. I felt she had used it as an excuse to get me over there so she could persecute me with her presence.
She ignored me and began to dig around the edges of the thing and pretty soon it was clear what it was, and it was considerably more exciting than a rock or bone.
It was the blade to a boat propeller.
She looked toward the bank where Howard and Paco were standing, staring out at the water.
She said, "There's something here."
Howard and Paco came over. Leonard and Chub showed up.
Howard looked at what was there, said, "Oh man, that means—"
"Means it's a boat propeller," Leonard said. "But not necessarily the boat propeller."
"How would a boat get up here?" Chub said.
"Water might have put it here and receded," I said. "Since no one would have looked for the boat down here, it might have been sitting here, slowly gathering dirt over it."
"Or," Paco said, "what we may have here is a propeller blade and a mound of dirt. But one thing's certain. There's a boat in there, we're not going to talk it out."
Shovels came out then, and we were on that mound of dirt like worms on a corpse. Howard and Paco and Leonard on one side, me and Chub on the other, Trudy with a trowel working at the propeller. Chub was so frenzied he nearly whacked me twice with his shovel handle, and he nipped my ankle with the shovel blade once. I had to threaten to do him damage to make him watch what he was doing. But we were all a little frenzied, and when Trudy uncovered a large hunk of outboard motor, even more so. We dug and we dug and the sun went down and the cold became colder, but I wasn't aware of it until I paused to relax and felt the sweat cooling on my face. The cold air cut at the rims and insides of my nostrils and sliced down my throat and hissed in my lungs and made them throb like a wound.
But I kept digging.
At some point Howard turned the wrecker toward us and pulled on the highbeams so we could see. We started digging even faster. We came to some thick twists of roots and we got the axe and Leonard elected himself Paul Bunyan. He cut at them with hard, precise strokes and the roots flew up and out, and we went back to digging. Finally Howard's shovel hit something that sounded unlike root or rock. He dropped his shovel and dipped his hands into the dirt and came out with the crumpled top of an aluminum cooler.
We all paused and looked at it. There in the cold highbeams and the splotchy moonlight, it had as much majesty as a silver shield. "Could be, could be," Howard said, and then we were digging again, really digging. The mole population of the world couldn't have been any busier. Wooden fragments that might have been boat pieces were found next. They were as crumbly as artificial fireplace logs.
Then Howard's shovel hit something else. He lifted out a long aluminum canister cracked in the middle. We all looked at it. I felt as if I had suddenly been filled with molten lava, that a little ice had gone out of my soul. Lost years were on the verge of being regained. Possibilities went through me, grew heads like a Hydra. The fact that this money might be partially mine for the taking, that it was stolen and illegal, filled me simultaneously with ecstasy and guilt, like I'd have felt if my mother had ever caught me jacking off to a girlfriend's picture.
Howard tried to loosen the lid, but couldn't. He finally resorted to bending it at the break to work it apart. He managed that and wads of something dark fell out of it. Trudy was suddenly there with a flashlight and Howard grabbed what had come out of the canister and squeezed it between his fingers and cussed.
I took hold of it too. It was paper, probably the money; it was black and the texture of wet tissue. Another year or so, it might make good garden mulch.
"There's supposed to be several containers," Trudy said. "They can't all be broken."
"Yes they can," Leonard said.
His words were anvils dropping on our heads. I felt a little dizzy and empty, as if hungry, but there wasn't any food that was going to fill this gap. The boat and the canister had given us a moment full of dreams, and now those dreams threatened to grow wings and fly south and die among the bones of all our dreams.
Yeah, that money could make up for a lot of missed ambitions, but without it we were nothing more than a batch of losers, standing cold and silly, empty-handed on the muddy bank of an unnamed creek.
We went back to digging and sifted through some more wood and some metal and plastic and some chunks of glass. Eventually we came up with another canister. This one wasn't broken open. Howard got a screwdriver and a wrench and with shaking hands went to work on the lid, popped it off.
Inside was some money. It was in a plastic bag, in bundles, and looked in good shape. Howard tore open the bag and the money fell out. Trudy grabbed it, unfolded it, dropped to her knees, starting counting.
I could hear her breathing, all of us breathing. We were puffing out white, cold smoke, chugging like little trains trying to make a last bad hill.
It took a long time to count that money, longer than I would have imagined, and we all stood there watching those bills go off that wad and out of her hands and onto the ground, and after what seemed enough time for continents to sink beneath the waves and new ones to rise up out of the sea on the shoulders of volcanic eruption and for new life-forms to come into existence, she said, "A hundred thousand."
With the sharp voice of greed, Howard said, "There's got to be more than that."
We went at it again, and before long uncovered another canister. Again the money was counted—this time we all took
some of it and made little piles—and what we had in this one was just short of two hundred thousand. All of it was in good shape. We dug till we found two more canisters. Both held money. One had a few damaged bills on top, but the bulk of it was okay. We leveled the mound. No more money.
We counted what was there, added it together. We had just over four hundred thousand. Trudy took the money and rolled it into tight little rolls and put it back in the bags and wrapped the bags firmly with some tape she had and put the spoils in the two best canisters.
"That's a lot less than a million," Howard said.
Though it looked as if my dream was going to be a smaller one than I had hoped for, I was glad to have anything. In fact, I felt a little giddy. I looked at Leonard. He nodded. I said, "Seems to me this is a good tax-free haul. Might be another canister or two in the water, but personally I've had it. This could be all there ever was. Talk about money is like talk about fish. Both grow in the telling."
"Me and Hap," Leonard said, "we'll take our share now. I want to get back to my dogs and Hap wants to get on down to Mexico."
Howard looked at Paco, then Chub and Trudy. "Now, huh?"
"That's right," I said.
"Well," Howard said, "just a minute." He stepped back and opened his coat and reached inside and pulled out something and pointed it at us. Even with his back to the headlights and there being only an occasional snatch of moonlight through the trees, I could see well enough to make a fairly accurate guess at what he was holding.
A flat little automatic.
Chapter 19
Turned out they all had guns. When Howard pulled his, they produced theirs. It was pretty disconcerting, all those people standing there holding cheap automatics.
Howard drove the wrecker. Trudy drove the mini-van. Chub drove Leonard's car and Paco hung over the front seat and pointed a .32 automatic at us. The bottoms raced by us in black bands and twists of oak fingers and pines shaped like dunce hats. The moon crept through it all and faded in and out with the rolling of the clouds.
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