by Sean McGinty
I couldn’t. It was just a little too far.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “Get two shirts, one white and one black. Drive out here and park in the turnaround. If the lot is empty, put on the white shirt. If you see anyone else around, even just a parked car, even if it’s my car, put on the black shirt. Got it? Empty lot: white shirt. Otherwise: black shirt. Next order of business: hike up the mountain. On the top, just outside the fence, you will find a communication, directing you as to—”
“Hold on a sec, Oso.”
“You’re not comfortable with the shirt idea. OK. We can work out something else. A different type of signal. Some kind of semaphore? The sneakier we are, the better. I don’t want you out there standing on one leg waving a blanket above your head. That just attracts unnecessary attention. Los Ojos de Dios are closing in, bro, I can feel it.”
“It’s just—I’m in the middle of something at the moment.”
I told him about the will, the code, the treasure.
“Well…huh. OK, maybe I’ll just head over there, then.”
And I swear it wasn’t fifteen minutes later that Oso showed up in his creeper truck. He got out, slung a green duffel over his shoulder, and headed over to the Russian olive. He jumped and caught a low, springy limb. The tree swayed under his weight, leaf shadows simmering in the dirt.
“So get this. I’m at El Capitan, waiting for them to make my number seventeen double chicken enchiladas to go, when the bell rings and the hottest girl I’ve seen in like forever walks in. I don’t even know the word for it. Wearing short shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt, bro. This little tie-dyed T-shirt.”
“El Capitan, the restaurant? I thought you couldn’t be seen in public.”
Oso dangled there from the tree limb, knees bent, hairy belly peeking out from under his shirt.
“I’m standing there by the fountain drinks, getting some Sparkl*Juice™. And when I look back I see that she’s coming over to the drinks, too, and it’s like, Oh, crap, here she comes! What’s she gonna do?! What am I gonna do?! So I put my lid on my drink, bro, real smooth, and I say to her—I say, ‘The Sparkl*Juice™ is a little flat’—and she looks at me and doesn’t say a word, she just smiles. But, bro, it was the best kind of smile. And talk about…” He cupped his hands gently in front of his chest, like a man cradling two baby bunnies.
“Enchiladas at El Capitan! And you wanted me out in the desert with semaphore flags?”
“Same thing happened last week. I was at Mass, and there was this other woman sitting in the next pew up. The reading was from one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians—I remember because I was thinking, Dude can really talk some shit when he wants to. He was going on and on about the providence of God, just laying into them Corinthians. And then I saw the woman. When she got up for communion, you should’ve seen the jeans she was wearing. That rose on the back pocket must’ve been stitched to her butt cheek. As she’s coming back down the aisle and I’m pretending to pray, she does the same thing—smiles at me. What’s up with that?”
“You’ve been going to church, too?”
“No one’s going to beat me in the house of God, bro. Not even Los Ojos de Dios.” Oso peered down at my labors. “Nice work, by the way. I hope you’re prepared, though. Because this whole enterprise is about to get a lot more fun.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah. The paradigm is about to shift, my friend.”
Oso knelt, unzipped his duffel, and extracted three black metal objects: two lengths of tubing, and a sort of a plate thing.
“By the way,” he said, “you know that gesture I made a second ago?”
“What’s that?”
“The gesture, bro. Two scoops of vanilla ice cream.” He held out his palms. “How long you think guys been doing this for?”
“I don’t know. A long time?”
“You bet your ass! I bet they did it in pioneer times. And the Renaissance. Bet you could bust it out for old Saint Paul and he’d know what you were talking about. Cavemen probably did it. It’s a universal gesture.”
I tried the gesture out. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Oso stood there, scrutinizing my hands. “But see, bro, I like to do it a little different. I like to give ’em a little bounce, like they’ve just fallen out of her bra.”
Oso finished assembling the device and held it up for me to see.
“Belongs to my little cousin. Belonged, I should say. My aunt was going to throw it out, so I took it. I had a feeling that someday it might come in handy. And here we are! Know what they call that?”
“A metal detector?”
“Providence, bro. But yeah, it’s a detector of metal, all right—let’s see what it can do!”
He flipped the switch to ON, and the machine began to emit a loud, high-pitched squeal, a harsh mix of overtones, like:
EEEEEEEEEEE!
He twisted the knob—there was only one knob—but no matter how he tuned it, or where he aimed the plate, the squeal did not change in pitch or volume. It just went EEEEEEEEEEE!
“Does that mean it’s found something?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
“Is it broken?”
“Don’t know. First time.”
EEEEEEEEEEE!
“Can I do something? Can I help? Maybe the batteries are low?”
“Nah, bro. The batteries aren’t low.”
Oso swept the machine over the ground, down into the holes, around the tree—but the sound would not stop.
EEEEEEEEEEE!
“How do you know the batteries aren’t low?”
“Because I just put some in!”
EEEEEEEEEEE!
Oso paced around the tree, sweeping the machine here and there, adjusting the distance from the earth, but still the sound would not stop. It was terrible—some kind of electric banshee. He walked further and further into the brush, and pretty soon he was dancing, stomping his feet and turning in a circle and swinging the thing like a ribbon around him. Like a Mayfair jig. He danced up a rise and down the other side until I couldn’t see him anymore—and when he returned, the sound had stopped.
The little plate dangled from a cord. He walked up to the Russian olive, raised the detector to his shoulder, and swung it through the air a couple times like a batter warming up.
“We got three options here, bro. Option A: there’s high metal content in the soil. What’s the ground like around here? You run any tests?”
“No—but I don’t think it’s any different than anywhere else.”
“OK, option B: there’s a psycho-magnetic disturbance, like we’re standing in some vortex. Have you looked at a compass? Does it spin in a circle?”
“Um, not to my knowledge.”
He nodded. “Of course, there’s always option C.”
“What’s option C?”
Oso took a couple more practice swings, and for a moment I thought he was going to bang it against the tree, but at the last second he swiveled his torso around and hucked the detector out into the air. Oso is a big guy, and he has a good arm on him. The detector arced high into the sky, diminishing in lazy somersaults, and for a moment it seemed to pause against the blue—frozen at its apex—before dropping to the earth and landing with a thunk in the brush.
“Option C, mi amigo, is that that thing is a piece of shit. How about I help you dig for a while?”
There was only enough room in the hole for one person. I shoveled up the dirt, filled a bucket, and Oso lifted the bucket out of the hole. It went fast with two people, and before long we had a pretty good-sized hole. From the bottom looking up it was impressive—if you squatted down and got the right angle, that is.
But still no treasure. We took a short break, which turned into a long break, and ended up shooting the shit for the rest of the afternoon.
I had a question:
“Hey, you know that girl you saw at El Capitan? You said she had on a tie-dye? Did she have long brown hair?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah! That’s right! You know her?”
“Well, maybe.”
I told him about Shiloh.
Oso’s eyes widened.
“The legendary Latham sisters! You telling me I spotted one in the wild and didn’t even know it?! Wow. But now that you say it, yeah, it was one of them. I’d say the hottest one of the bunch. Definitely hotter than Savannah.”
“Really? You think? Savannah’s the oldest one, right? What about Shawna?”
“Shawna? You serious? Shawna is near the bottom of my list, bro.”
This was territory we’d covered before. The old Latham Sister Archetype Dilemma—like the dilemma you feel when opening a package of new QuadStuff™ DoubleStak™ Oreo Cookies (YAY!)—like which delicious cream-filled wedge are you going to eat first?
It’s like this: growing up in Mormon country you begin to notice that with large families, certain genetic traits become more evident with the repetition of children. In the Lathams’ case, there were two basic templates. First, you have the more angular but also mousier model, who takes after Sam’s mother, and then there’s the rounder-faced, wide-eyed model, who I tended to favor. Both were beautiful in their own way, and I guess you could imagine it as a bell curve, with the middle portion—the averages—being debatable, and either end of the curve—the extremes—being more or less beyond dispute. Like, Oso and I could both agree that Shiloh was hot. And then at the other end you had poor Sally.
But I wasn’t interested in Sally or Shiloh—or Savannah, or Shaley, or Shawna, or any of them. I told Oso about how Katie had come by, our little moment in the kitchen.
“There was a spark. I felt it. I know I did.”
“The light in the monkey,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s something my uncle says. ‘There’s a light in the monkey.’”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me either. It’s kind of like a Mexican zen koan. I think it maybe has to do with you being the monkey and that spark you felt could be the light. Or maybe you are both the light and the monkey? There’s room for interpretation, bro. But you kind of know it when you feel it, right? Like you and that girl.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
So ended my seven days of digging. Where was the treasure? Seven days gone. Seven days nothing. In seven days God created everything, all the planets and stars and birds and trees and monkeys and people. And me? I dug three holes.
The next day I drove into town to see my sister.
YAY! for the Daily Intelligencer newspaper, whose award-winning, in-depth coverage of quilting circles and traffic accidents is delivered twice weekly to the greater Antello County area. The offices were in an old building downtown, and when I got there Evie was doing a phone interview, so I had to wait. There were a couple back issues of the Daily on a table, and I flipped through them. It was strange. A real, physical paper newspaper. The news was kind of interesting, though—like for example, this thing they were calling “Jamboree-gate.”
Personally, I would’ve called it “Motor-gate” or “Moto-jambo-gate,” because either of those has a better ring to it, but then of course I’d be too lazy to write the actual article—which is why my sister is a reporter and not me. Basically, the gist was that the city council, a scandalous nest of weasels if there ever was one, was in danger of completely destroying the upcoming fourth annual Antello International Motorcycle Jamboree yet again.
To begin with, they’d botched the vendor licensing contract to the point that the state sent in an auditor. Also, they’d scheduled it on the same weekend as Lovelock’s own tenth annual Harley Fest, so now there was direct competition. Finally, the cleaning and sanitation committee had awarded not one but two no-bid contracts to the mayor’s brother-in-law. OTOH, there was going to be a Battle of the Bands. Dad’s band, the JC Wonder Excursion, was already signed up to play. I read all about it in the article Evie wrote.
As I flipped through the pages, I noticed that a lot of the stories contained my sister’s byline. Like over half of them. From the looks of it, it was just Evie, one other dude, and the Associated Press.
The office door opened and Evie appeared.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you, like, the only reporter or what?”
My sister looked at me. “You didn’t know that? They let everyone go but Brian and me. It’s insane. When I started out we had six reporters. SIX, Aaron.” She fanned out her fingers and added a thumb. “Now it’s two!”
“You’re doing a good job.”
“No, I’m hanging by my fingernails from a ledge. And do they thank me? Oh, they thank me all right, and then they ask for more. You’re doing a good job, Evelyn. You’re keeping us afloat. No, I’m drowning here.”
“I thought you were hanging from a ledge.”
“Both. I’m hanging and the water is rising and I just know they’re going to walk in here one day and turn off the lights and shut the whole thing down. It’s only a matter of time. Journalism is dead, Aaron. This, what you see here, is the death rattle.” She threw herself into a chair and let out a sigh. It was weird to see her like that. Most of the time with my sister it’s about 80% for show, but here she seemed truly bummed. I tried to cheer her up as best I could.
“You’re doing a good job. The articles are cool.”
“You don’t get the paper out at Grandpa’s, do you? I’m signing you up, OK? It’ll, like, double our subscription rate.”
I was on my way out the door when Evie stopped me.
“Hey,” she said. “Wait. So why did you come here anyway?”
I reminded her about the dig and my promise to find something in a week, but she was so wrapped up in her own stuff, it almost didn’t register.
“Right,” she said. “And did you find anything?”
The way my sister was looking at me, it gave me pause. The truth is I’d kind of been thinking about telling her I was done, we could sell the house. But that wasn’t going to cut it. “I haven’t found anything—yet. That’s what I came here to tell you, I just need a little more time. There’s something there. I’m really close. Just a little more time, that’s all.”
And then came the heat: 98 the next day, 99 the next, then straight up to 104. Evie had signed me up for a subscription to the paper, and on Thursday the latest edition arrived. The heat wave wasn’t quite yet enough to break any records, so the Daily went looking for another angle. A chiropractor had passed out in his attic after trying to fix the swamp cooler. He was driven by his wife and daughter to the hospital and revived, and the three of them made the front page under the headline HIGH TEMPS CONTINUE, which I would’ve changed to DEATH TOTAL FOR HEAT WAVE HOLDS STEADY AT ZERO.
Given the heat, I decided on a new, more efficient approach. Instead of digging blind pilot holes here and there, I’d approach it more scientifically. I tied a string to the trunk of the tree, measured out eight feet, and walked it in a circle, dragging my bar in the dirt to trace out the circumference. Within this circle I’d dig down an inch at a time, as in an archaeology excavation.
The top layers were much softer than the hardpan underneath, so for a while—until I’d extracted the top foot or so—my work would be easier. Or so I thought. But I hadn’t factored in the heat effect or the fact that digging is still digging no matter how you dig it—which is to say: WORK.
It took the better part of two days to dig out that first foot, and my hands were blistered pretty bad by now, and I could feel my resolve slipping. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of my sister, and how hard she was working, and how nice it would be to walk up to her with a couple gold bars tucked under my arm and say, “Take it. Go treat yourself to a day at the nerd spa or whatever.”
Anyway, three days into my new approach and I was about ready to give up, and then something happened. I was digging out the perimeter on the western end when I heard a sound. It was like: tink!
By this point I knew the sound of a rock, and this did not sound like a rock. I
set the shovel aside and knelt on the ground to brush away the dirt, and there it was, looking me right in the eye. I’d found something. Holy shit. I’d FOUND something!
It was…
(…Drrruuuuuuumrollllllllllllllllllllll…)
A fork.
A fork?
Yup, that’s what it was. The pattern on the handle matched the set in the kitchen.
OK, a fork.
I polished it with my shirt and set it against the tree. It sat there looking back at me. I dug some more, and not much later I found something else.
A spoon.
OK, a spoon.
Were they silver maybe? I brushed the dirt off the spoon and read the inscription. Stainless steel. Great. Wonderful. What next?
Two more spoons and another fork. Then a pair of butter knives, another fork, and two more spoons. I tossed them over to where the fork and spoon were. They clanged off each other as the pile grew. Along with the forks and spoons and knives, I also found a cheese grater, a pair of tongs, and that spatula Katie had been looking for. Oso’s metal detector had been correct. There was metal junk everywhere. But that was the problem. That’s all it was: junk.
After all the clues, this is what he’d buried? I kept digging, but the more kitchen items I excavated, the more I began to doubt the whole enterprise. What next? A toaster?
And yet every time I heard the shovel hit metal I was hopeful, like it might be something more than a fork or a spoon or whatever—but it never was.
Around noon, clouds began to gather—thunderheads—blotting out the western sky. The gray washed overhead and the wind began to rise. The air cooled, and my shadow began to fade, then disappeared altogether, soaking into the ground like water. In the distance, Anne Chicarelli’s horses were becoming agitated in their corral. They charged the perimeter, necks outstretched, plunging through the cooling air. I could feel it too: something was coming.
And then it came.
I was chucking another spoon at the pile when I saw a flash. Lightning branched up the sky, a fiery tree, quickly burning itself out. A moment of silence, then a deep rumble began to gather at the far edge of hearing. It rolled across the land in a low, crackling chorus, and then the crackle opened into a giant BLAM! that shook the very ground beneath me.
