by Jon Cohen
He patted her shoulder. “I do remember.” He forced a confident smile and stepped onto the mound of slate.
They descended carefully, lowering themselves a dozen feet through thick underbrush and overhanging spruce tree limbs. The forty pounds of gold in his pack felt like a thousand. It was a half mile back to his car. He’d have to make this trip five times.
It wasn’t a true cave, but a large alcove, a pocket in the side of the slate mound. The patio in the backyard of Harry’s house in Waverly was made of the same bluestone slate, cut into neat suburban rectangles. He had taken pleasure in keeping the stones swept and tidy. It appealed to his bureaucratic nature. But now the forest was his home. Here, the bluestone was pocked and covered with orange and green lichen, snaggle-toothed. Here, life was wild and woolly.
Oriana could stand up in the little cave, but Harry had to crouch. Light speckled in through the vines that curtained the entrance. It was cool and smelled of earth and stone. A proper vault for gold, elemental, lost in time.
Oriana’s job had been to carry the five remaining empty burlap bags. She put them down and helped Harry wriggle free of the backpack. The gold was heavy, but the burden of it was getting lighter. A strange lightness of being.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to give Phil Bartek’s friend the next bag?” Oriana said.
“No. It would be dumb. What’s the rule, Oriana?”
“It has to be random.”
“Because random is safe.” Harry settled the two boxes of gold on the stony floor. He looked around. “This is a good spot. You did a good job.”
“What if we flip a coin and it lands on Elkdale again?” she said.
“Then we flip again.”
“What if it lands on the next town over, would that be okay?”
“Stop. You’re making me anxious. We pick a town. Randomly. I drop off some gold. I run. I don’t want to overthink this.”
“You’re doing a good job,” Oriana said.
It really was going remarkably smoothly. “We make a good team,” Harry said.
They made a very good team, so Oriana felt a little tiny bit bad about something she did. But she couldn’t help it. She really couldn’t. They had finished storing the portion of the gold they would hide in the cave, and now they were up in the tree house with the second bag of gold, which sat on the kitchen table. The first bag had contained $250,000 in coins. This one held $300,000. So would bags three and four. The last two would hold over a million each. They would be the grum’s “great heaps and hurls.” Only he and Oriana would ever understand the logic. The grum of it all.
Harry spread out the Susquehanna County map on the cot. Oriana reached into the burlap bag and picked out a coin. Held it up. Harry gave the signal and she flipped it into the air. It thunked onto the map, twirled and dropped, eagle side up. Harry nudged it aside.
“Halfordsville,” he said. A larger town than Elkdale.
“That’s where we go to the movies—Halfordsville.”
As Harry intently studied the map, Oriana casually picked up the gold coin and turned toward the bag on the kitchen table. She looked over her shoulder. Harry was still staring at the map. She felt a little jab of conscience as her hand hovered above the open bag. The gold in the light. Such a beautiful magic disc. And all she wanted was one coin of her very own.
One coin wouldn’t matter. And she wasn’t going to steal it, she just wanted one temporarily, to look at and play with. Then she’d slip it back into the final bag of gold. It would be her secret, she’d keep it in her room. Gold of her own. Borrowed. She slipped the coin into her pocket. Oh, the thrilling secret weight of it.
She poked the burlap bag to make it clink as if the coin had been dropped in. Harry turned at the sound and said, “Halfordsville’s great. There’s a good main road right off I-81. This should be even easier than Elkdale.”
Harry folded the map and joined her at the kitchen table. He took hold of the bag. “Help me tie this closed. Then it’s time for you to go home. And time for me to go to Halfordsville.” They tied the bag.
Oriana hesitated in the doorway. Her legs didn’t want to move her out of the tree house.
“Go,” Harry said. “Before your mother comes.”
He gave her a small push, and then she was off and running, down the spiral steps, like Cinderella escaping the midnight castle—a Cinderella who had not lost a shoe, but snitched an extra one from the prince’s closet to admire when she got home.
* * *
Deep are the bonds of friendship. Long are the memories of discord.
Francine Dillon and Ginger Thompson had been best friends and best enemies since first grade at Halfordsville Elementary School. On the first day of school in 1960, their desks were side by side. Now their houses were side by side, Francine in a blue Dutch Colonial and Ginger in a green Victorian. Both were divorced, each had two children, now grown up and moved away. Ginger’s children had stayed in Pennsylvania. Francine’s lived in Austin, Texas! Francine always said it with an exclamation point. All the way to Texas! She rarely got to see them, so whenever one of Ginger’s came for a weekend, Francine experienced a twinge of envy.
Just a twinge.
Not like the full-bore rage she felt in twelfth grade when Barry Kelmer, who was supposed to ask Francine to the senior prom, asked Ginger instead. That was a five day disruption in their friendship. Francine had actually slapped Ginger. When the blow landed, both girls burst into tears and hugged.
“I don’t want him,” Ginger sobbed. “I just want you to be my friend.”
“Best friends, always, always,” Francine sobbed.
To show there were no hard feelings, Francine baked Ginger treats. Ginger, a pretty girl, but ten pounds heavier than the ideal (plain Francine was willowy as a whippet) loved anything that came out of an oven. Preferably gooey with several thousand pounds of chocolate chips.
Best friends can be so trying. Especially when the friendship lasts decades.
“What did you do to your hair!” Francine shrieked in 1969. “You look like you ate a bowl of electricity.” They were standing in Ginger’s bedroom. Rather, Francine was standing. Ginger had collapsed onto the floor in a moaning heap.
“Don’t say that, I feel terrible.” Her hair, a mix of porcupine spikes and roller coaster spirals, was a fascinating horror. Against all common sense, she’d allowed Frieda, of Frieda’s Hair Deluxe, to give her a perm.
“You look terrible,” Francine said. “I’m sorry, but you do. How are you going to go to school tomorrow?”
“Go away,” Ginger moaned. “I hate you. You’re not helping.”
Francine considered. Her best friend lay sobbing on the floor. It was not easy to come by friends in Halfordsville. It was a small, boring town.
Francine sighed, scooped up Ginger and guided her into the shower. After several vigorous applications of Prell and gobs of conditioner, they restored Ginger’s injured locks.
“You are my best friend in all the world,” Ginger said, hugging her.
Now they were sixty-one years old, and they’d had another fight. In their loneliness, they had each other. So it was stupid to have had this latest tiff. There was only one way to end an extended tiff with Ginger. Baked goods.
Francine smiled as she took the brownies out of the oven. The sun was not up yet, but the sky was lightening. She looked out the kitchen window at her favorite sight in all the world: the magnificent sugar maple in Ginger’s front yard.
“What nincompoops we are, Ginger,” she said.
The sugar maple was the source of the latest squabble. It was the most beautiful tree in Halfordsville. Maybe even in all of the Endless Mountains. Francine was jealous of Ginger’s tree. Why did she long to own it? Why wasn’t it enough that it was in Ginger’s yard, fifty feet away?
It all started because Ginger wanted to cut a lower li
mb from the tree.
“You can’t,” Francine exclaimed. “That would be like amputating an angel’s finger!”
Ginger laughed. “That’s gross, but funny.”
Francine wasn’t trying to be funny. “I’m serious.”
“The squirrels are using it to get in my gutters,” Ginger said.
“But from my window...there’s this balance.” How could Francine explain balance and symmetry to this old fool. And Ginger was getting old. And heftier. And she catered to those children of hers, far too much.
“It’s the smallest limb, Francine. It’s inconsequential.”
“Please.”
“How about I give it to you after I have it taken off?” Ginger was in a teasing mood. A tree limb, for god’s sake. Francine needed to lighten up.
Francine glowered. “How about, after you have it taken off, you shove it up your voluminous butt.”
The two friends spun away from each other, marched up their front walks, and slammed their front doors so hard that Bill Palmer, two streets over, thought he heard pistol shots.
The sun was coming up, the brownies were cool enough to cut, stack neatly in a Tupperware container and leave on Ginger’s front porch. It’s only a tree limb, Francine chided herself, who cares? Abundant are the limbs on trees, rare is the friendship that is true.
Francine walked past the sugar maple and started up Ginger’s front walk. She stopped short. While she did not have an actual heart attack when she realized the crumpled bag leaning against Ginger’s front door was a burlap bag just like The Scranton Times said had been found on the porch of that man over in Elkdale, Francine had many of the symptoms. Shortness of breath, dizziness, strong palpitations and a sense of imminent death.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “No, no, no.” Whoever was delivering bags of gold (she had now opened the burlap bag and the glow was blinding) had given one to Ginger Thompson and not to Francine Dillon.
Francine sat on the front step beside the bag, brownies in her lap, the sun just rising. She looked to her left. Looked to her right. No one on Plindon Avenue was awake. Her fingers tapped nervously on the Tupperware lid. I cannot bear it, she thought. I cannot bear that Ginger has a bag of gold. She’ll be able to pay off her mortgage. She’ll be able to plant dozens of sugar maples in her front yard, if she wants to. The Scranton Times will have a large photo of her, grinning. For doing nothing, Ginger was about to become a kind of hero.
“No, no, no,” Francine whispered. She put down the Tupperwared brownies and, grunting with effort, picked up the bag of gold and lumbered back across Ginger’s lawn toward her own house. She didn’t make it past the maple tree.
“No,” she said weakly. “No, Francine.” She breathed in the essence of the tree. The trueness and the purity of its existence on earth.
Ginger, my Ginger, Francine thought. Your life has not been ideal. You never had good hair. Your son played drums and not the cello.
Francine returned the bag of gold to its spot on Ginger’s front porch. She left the Tupperware of brownies on top of the bag—one brownie short because Francine had taken one for herself. She crossed the lawn, walking slowly in the beautiful dawn light. And it was enough. Dawn, a fresh stolen brownie, a good cup of coffee, and from her kitchen window a view of the sugar maple so vivid and green it brought tears to Francine’s eyes.
27
One bag of gold on a doorstep was an isolated, freakish miracle. Like a meteor smashing through your garage roof. The citizens of Susquehanna County were able to wrap their heads around the staggering but conceivable nature of it. The appearance of the second bag of gold a week later in Halfordsville was a mind-blowing sensation. Because a second bag meant that someone was handing out bags of gold. Plural. Bags. Bags of gold were about to start raining down on doorsteps.
It was early May, warm and green, not even remotely Christmasy. But when somebody yakking on a local news station came up with the corny-but-perfect nickname that best encompassed the legendary qualities of a serial gift giver, it went viral. Susquehanna Santa. Christmas in May! Susquehanna Santa doesn’t squeeze down your chimney in the middle of the night. No, he delivers to your front doorstep like a nocturnal UPS.
Where would the next bag land? The phenomenon was obviously and intriguingly local. Elkdale was only twenty miles from Halfordsville. And when? Would a week go by between every one of the bags? And how many bags would there be? Some tight-ass on talk radio groused, “Well, you have to pay taxes on it. It’s income.” So what? Good problem to have. You don’t want gold on your doorstep, toss it over to me, pal!
During a man-on-the-street interview in Halfordsville, the Scranton reporter holding the mike right up to a big farmer’s ruddy nose, the farmer actually said, “You know how Santa lives in the North Pole? Well, Susquehanna Santa lives in the Endless Mountains.” This was a grown man talking. The lore, the fairy tale, the myth, growing by the minute. By the internet nanosecond.
Yes, it was the age of the internet, but the world was also still touchingly old-fashioned. Handmade signs began to appear on front lawns: SUSQUEHANNA SANTA PLEASE STOP HERE!!!!!!
Stu Giptner had passed a dozen such signs on the way to work. Now, he sat brooding in his hellishly small office. “Everybody going apeshit,” he grumbled. “Like it could happen to them. Yeah. Right. Never in a trillion years.”
What he really meant was—never in a trillion years would that kind of luck happen to him. The universe had found another way to torture Stu Giptner. So why had he taped a map of Susquehanna County to his wall and stuck red pushpins on Halfordsville and Elkdale? Because through serious cogitation, he might be able to break the code.
“Because if I break the code, if I can see where the next bag is gonna land, then...”
Well, then he would buy a house in that town. He’d crack the code, figure out the town where Susquehanna Santa would take his next gold dump and buy a little “as is” house. Then he’d plant, like, a thousand PLEASE STOP HERE!!!! signs in the front yard. He’d go big. Neon signs, strobe lights, sirens. He’d shoot Santa out of the sky if he had to. No, that’s the other Santa. Susquehanna Santa probably drives a black Lexus IS 250C convertible. Leather-wrapped steering wheel, bird’s-eye maple dash, paddle-shifter, alloy wheels, V6.
Stu’s head throbbed. Phil Bartek’s and Ginger Thompson’s haul were both six figures? Had they spent their entire adult lives striving toward six figures like he had? No, no, don’t you see, Susquehanna Santa? Stu Giptner is The Six Figure Man.
“It’s not fair,” Stu said. He felt like punching somebody. He couldn’t believe he had punched Harry Crane. Who didn’t even have the guts to punch back. I need to throw another punch. I need to make things happen. I need to be somebody.
Stu cringed when he heard his boss’s door open. What he needed, and desperately, was to throw a real estate punch or he’d lose his goddamn job. That’s the thing I need to make happen. Six figures, six figures, make it happen, make it happen.
Stu stood up and stared at the county map, suddenly drawn to it. Why? What did his mind perceive? Symmetry. That spot on the map equidistant between the red pushpins of Elkdale and Halfordsville. At the edge of the big green chunk of government forest, right about there—he placed his thumb on the spot as if he was squashing a bug—Amanda Jeffers’s house.
* * *
Even the ER patients, bumped and bloodied, wheezing with asthma, half-dazed with their injuries and ailments—it’s the first thing they’d mention. It was getting ridiculous. On top of everything else, they were suffering from gold fever.
The patient in room 6, a man named Hank Captow, had broken his arm falling off a ladder. “Nurse,” he said. “You hear about them bags of gold?”
“Did one fall on you, Mr. Captow?” Amanda was always professional when she addressed patients. Not “Hank” but “Mr. Captow.” She did not believe in getting chummy. Pa
tients wanted, and deserved, an adult in charge.
He laughed. “Nah. But I wish one would.”
“Doesn’t your arm hurt? That’s a pretty good fracture.” It’s one of the things she liked about the rural life—these tough old birds who would talk about crop rotation or hunting while the doc sewed a finger back on or stitched a leathery forehead.
He stared at the lump on his wrist matter-of-factly. “Yeah, it aches some, I guess. What would you do with a bag of gold?”
Pay off my loan, pay off my truck, put money in a college fund for Oriana, Amanda thought. “I don’t believe in Santa,” she said.
“How do you mean? It’s really happening.”
“Happened,” Amanda said. “It’s not going to happen again.”
Mr. Captow looked at her. “Not a daydreamer, huh?”
She gave him a pill, despite his protests, to dull the pain she knew was coming his way. The world was a predictable place. You break your arm, it’s going to hurt when they twist your ulna bone back into alignment down in the cast room. You dream of Susquehanna Santa, your silly childish heart is going to break.
The EMT guys, coming in and out of the ER, were full of gold chatter, too. One of them, Bill Planowsky, suddenly veered off-topic.
“So, how’s Harry?” he said.
Amanda was at the nurses’ station, and Bill was wheeling by with an empty ambulance stretcher.
“How is Harry?” she repeated. Because it caught her totally off guard, this casual mention of Harry, who was now part of the community, or at least on the edges of it. Bill had been at Green Gables when Harry was in the booth.
“Mr. Tree House,” Bill said.
A touch of red blushed Amanda’s cheeks. She felt like she was in high school. “You think you know all the details, huh?”
“We know what we saw, sure.”
“What did you see?” What she wanted them to see, of course. That it looked like she and Harry were an item. Touching and carrying on in the booth. You can’t have it both ways, Amanda, she told herself. The whole point of Harry was to keep guys like Bill at bay. And to dig at Cliff. And to...her cheeks going warm again, at the memory of Harry reaching out to fix her hair.
