by Johnny Shaw
“That’s a lot of chocolate. Almost the length of the Cal/Arizona border,” Frank said.
Ricky laughed. “But at least it’s not in the middle of an artillery range.”
“Yeah, that’s the bad news,” Harry said.
“What now?” Frank asked.
“The Arizona Chocolates are a gunnery range, too. Or to be more precise, gunnery ranges.” Harry reached for another map and spread it out on top. “From here to here. And here to here. That whole area is US Army land. That’s the Yuma Proving Ground.”
“Proving Ground? What are they trying to prove?” Ricky said.
“That they can blow shit up.”
Harry dug through a stack of library books. He was back to drinking beer, having knocked back three in fifteen minutes. “The reason nobody has found that mine is because it’s in the middle of a war zone. It sounds like I’m making this up, but I’m underselling the place. You name it, this is where the Army shoots it, explodes it, or throws it out of a helicopter.”
Harry pulled out a book and flipped through the pages rapidly.
Frank said, “Okay. They train out there, but not all the time and not in every place.”
Harry held up his hand, having found what he was looking for. He read out loud, adding a few of his own personal footnotes. “The Yuma Proving Ground in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, established in 1943 by the US Army, is one of the largest military installations in the world. In the whole world. At thirteen hundred square miles, it is roughly the size of Rhode Island—of course it is—with multiple variations in terrain. Blah, blah, blah. More history. General whoever. Important training facility. Where is it? This book is a little old and the numbers’ll be off, but...Here it is. Get prepared to softly say, ‘Holy mother of God,’ to yourself.
“With a number of active ranges, over four hundred thousand artillery rounds are fired in any given year. Four hundred thousand. That’s more than a thousand a day. An average of one hundred parachute drops a day. I’ll repeat, a day. In one day! Thousands of air sorties. I don’t even know what a sortie is. Blah, blah, blah. We are screwed.
“Read it yourself. It’s like an arsenal for a 1980s action movie. They have minefields, tank courses, artillery ranges, mortar ranges, missile ranges. Missiles. A helicopter range for the choppers to shoot at stuff, including something called the Brimstone missile, which you know kills the hell out of a thing, and I’m thinking with fire. They have a road course running through the mountains for all sorts of badass military vehicles. Do you know what a howitzer is? They’re like huge cannons. They got a bunch of those.”
Frank tried to bring the tone back toward optimism. “They’ve got to take time off. Might not be nowhere near the mine.”
“Do you read the newspaper? In the last twenty years, we seem to only be fighting in countries that have a lot of desert and mountains and deserty mountains. It’s a popular place. And not just for the Army. For the whole world. Sure, the Army’s there—but get this—other countries train there as well. Japs, Germans, Canadians, even the Swedes. And who the holy hell are the Swedes fighting?
“For all my faults, I’ve never been a man that swore.” Harry’s voice rose. “But our motherfucking gold mine is smack-fucking-dab in the middle of the biggest fucking military jumble-fuck that the fucking free world has ever fucking seen. And also, motherfucker.”
Harry got up and paced.
“We get it. What does that mean?” Ricky said.
Frank smiled. “It means we’re probably going to die trying to get that gold.”
Harry turned to him. “You heard what I said, yeah? And you still want to go?”
“So it’s garbage news. A little piss in the picnic basket. But we’re here. We got this far. We’ve held gold in our hands. We can’t turn back. We’re in this. Why pretend? It might take a day or a week or goddamn months, but we’re going to eventually decide to find that mine. Even if it kills us.”
“Easy for you to say, Frank,” Harry said. “You’re dying already. No offense.”
Frank gave Harry a hard stare. “Give me a straight answer. You going to forget the gold and go back to your life? Go back to working your shit job at the prison? Are you, Shitburger?”
Harry looked at the trailer around him, walked to the fridge, and took out another beer.
“I hate that name,” Harry said, “But that’s who I am if I settle for this life. Let’s find that mine or die trying. I’m all in.”
Frank turned. “Ricky?”
Ricky nodded. “Crazy old man. You go through the trouble to save me from killing myself just to find a whole new way for me to kill myself.”
“Things happen whatever way they want to,” Frank said.
“They happen for a reason,” Ricky said. “Of course I’m in.” Reaching for his cup of dirty water to raise for a toast, Ricky knocked over the cup full of teeth. They spilled over the table and around the gold ingot. They didn’t make a pattern and it didn’t seem like an omen, but they all stared at the teeth before lifting their drinks.
Frank made the toast. “To Abraham Constance. He may have been a murderous son of a bitch, probably rotting in hell, but without him we’d never have gotten this far.”
They touched glasses and drank.
Ricky said, “Don’t forget to bury his head.”
PART FOUR: STUPID SMART
TWENTY-TWO
If Harry was going to do something stupid, he was damn sure going to be smart about it.
That’s why he was sitting in a booth across from Cooker Hobson at a Denny’s in Winterhaven, California. As his name would suggest, Cooker cooked. He possessed fairly well-regarded recipes for both baby back ribs and snickerdoodles. His Triple-Layer Carrot-Rhubarb Pie had won first prize at the Carrot Festival in Holtville. Cooker could cook just about anything. But mostly, he cooked methamphetamine.
Harry had met Cooker at Chuckawalla when Harry was a guard and Cooker an inmate. Their mutual hatred for another guard, “Kirch” Kirchenbauer, gave them a jumping-off point to at least a conversational acquaintanceship. Sometimes all it took was a real douche bag to create peace between two less vehement enemies.
Cooker had been clean—or at least uncaught—for a couple of years. He worked short order at the Denny’s. In the last year, Harry and Cooker had bumped into each other a few times. Never more than a nod of recognition, but Harry felt okay approaching him. As guards went, he was well liked at Chuckawalla, generous with his porn stash, and always willing to look the other way for a reasonable price.
“Why am I sitting here?” Cooker asked. He hadn’t bothered to take off the hairnet that held his ponytailed, graying hair. His handlebar mustache dripped with coffee. It made him look like a walrus coming out of brown water. The world’s smallest walrus. Cooker wasn’t an inch over five feet, and aside from a volleyball-shaped potbelly, he was skin and bones.
“I need some information.”
Cooker gave a look over his shoulder. The restaurant was close to empty.
“You starting a lab? It’s a solid investment, Shits. I can help you there, but I got to earn. Mind you, I can’t help in person, and you’ll want to be careful. I got a book I self-published. It’s available on Amazon, both in paperback and Kindle. Everything you need, all the tricks of the trade. Safety tips. Equipment checklists. It’s organized good as shit.”
“I’m not starting a damn meth lab, Cooker,” Harry said, too loud.
Cooker looked slightly offended. “Easy, Shits. Ain’t got to act all surprised. That’s what I do.”
“I’m not starting a meth lab,” Harry repeated evenly.
“Then why the fuck we talking? Lunch crowd’ll be here soon. You best hurry this reunion along.”
“You were in the Army, right? I remember you talking about it.”
“I served.”
“You were stationed in Yuma?”
“Few months. Not long. Trained there before Iraq. The first Iraq. The righteous one. Desert Storm, mother
fucker.”
“I need to know about the Proving Ground. Mostly the terrain. As much as you can remember.”
“Why you want to know?”
Harry ignored the question. “First, I need to know where the best trails are to reach—”
Cooker interrupted, leaning over the table between them. “I didn’t ask what you want to know. Only one kind of fucker wants to know what the inside of a military installation looks like. That’s a terrorist fucker, motherfucker.”
Harry started to laugh and then realized that Cooker was serious. “No, no, no. Back it up.”
“You see this?” Cooker said, rolling up the sleeve of his shirt. His skin was blue with tattoos, overlapping three deep in places. But one tattoo stayed pristine on the meat of his forearm. It was a shield or coat of arms with a cannon and a horse on it, a faded yellowish orange. “Second Cavalry. Wolfpack.”
Harry didn’t know what to say, so he nodded.
“I may be the fuck-up of all fuck-ups. Cooked fatch. Sold it. Been busted. Shit, maybe even killed a couple fuckers. Not much of a crime if they ain’t missed. But I’m a goddamn American. And if you’re planning any un-American horseshit, any squirrelly Ay-rab horseshit, then you’re fingering the wrong hole.”
Harry sat back in the booth holding up his hands. “I’m not a terrorist. It’s nothing like that. I love my country. I have a good reason. Just can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me? Then I can’t tell you jack shit. Maybe I’ll even call Homeland, see what they think about your unpatriotical Commie questions.”
“What could a terrorist do in the middle of them mountains anyway?” Harry realized he was raising his voice. He brought it back down. “The Proving Ground ain’t nothing but a place the Army uses to blow stuff up. What am I going to do? Explode something that’s already exploded? Or explode it before it explodes?”
“That shit don’t explode on its own. You could steal something. They got missiles, bombs, all sorts of death out there.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You don’t tell it straight, I’m making some government calls. I’m on parole. I need to be talking to a dumbfuck terrorist like I need a second asshole.”
“Bird-watching,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Colaptes chrysoides. The gilded flicker.”
“Speak fucking English. You talk more of that foreign shit, I’m going to think you’re talking terrorist.”
“It’s a bird. The gilded flicker is a bird, and the only place that that bird lives is in the Chocolate Mountains. Not near the river. Deep in the mountains.”
“And you want to the jump the fence into the Proving Ground to...?”
“To watch it. To see it. To take pictures of it.”
Cooker scooted to the edge of the booth. “You are full of some serious shit.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars,” Harry said, reaching for his wallet.
Cooker stopped, turning back to Harry. “A fucking bird?”
“It’s the truth.”
“You know there are minefields and artillery, on top of the heat and the mountains and the rattlers, right? You want to go through all that shit to take a picture of a bird?”
“Not any bird. The gilded flicker.”
“Whatever the fuck.”
“It’s what any dedicated bird-watcher would do. I can’t explain, but I need to see it before I die.”
“You sneak into the Proving Ground, probably get your wish.”
“Not if you tell me what you know.” Harry pulled out his map and spread it over the table. “What’s the safest way to get to here? That’s the best spot for the flicker. Their nesting canyon.”
“And you’re sure you’re not a terrorist? I ain’t going to give you directions, then in a couple of months, I turn on the TV and there’s a picture of a smoking building and your ugly puss.”
“I love birds.”
Cooker thought about it for a while. “Fuck that. There’s another angle.”
They sat in silence for a full minute, Cooker waiting Harry out. Harry finally broke the silence. “Nobody has taken a picture of it in thirty-two years.”
Cooker smiled, finally satisfied. “There it is. And you’re going to be the guy to get the—what-do-you-call-it—the exclusive. Someone’s paying for the bird picture, right? Paying real money. National Geographic–type shit?”
“Let’s just say my bird hobby is about to pay off.”
“How much? Must be a lot.”
“Enough.”
“Thousand bucks. That’s what it’ll cost for me to help you find your gilded fucker.”
“Flicker. I ain’t paying that much. A hundred fifty. To map out a trail.”
“Five hundred. But I can’t guarantee that shit ain’t changed. Been like twenty years. Could be the trails are gone. Could be I send you into the middle of a patrol. Get you more lost than you would be. Or I walk you into a minefield. All I’m saying is: you die, it’s not on me.”
“I’ll take my chances. Two hundred bucks.”
“Three fifty.”
“Two sixty-five.”
“Two seventy-five. Up front.”
“Deal.”
TWENTY-THREE
There’s no such thing as a born liar. Although Harry was pretty sure he had met a few women that came close. A good liar was the product of experience and craft, like any true artist. Execution and performance were integral, but it was the construction of the narrative that was the make-or-break. That’s where Harry shined. He did his homework.
As he had dug up information about bird-watching, he reminded himself of the components of a good lie: keep your facts straight, details add realism, less is more, truth is stranger than fiction, add a touch of absurdity, you have to believe it yourself.
Nothing helped the success of a lie more than the other person wanting to believe. It could be because they were as gullible as a Mississippi prom queen. Or greedier than an old millionaire’s teenage fiancée. But most people believed lies out of sheer laziness. It was easier to believe a person than to challenge them.
Cooker had doubted him at first. But by making Cooker think that Harry was holding back, when Harry finally gave him the “truth,” Cooker was primed to believe. Cooker wasn’t any different than the other prisoners at Chuckawalla. Another poor, dumb convict.
After Harry gave him the cash, Cooker mapped out the path through the Proving Ground. He had admitted that some of the terrain was unfamiliar, just guesswork, but the trail wasn’t that different from what Harry had got from his own best guesses and Google satellite images. It was a strong second vote and cheap for the price.
Harry headed back to Blythe with a rough plan, a preliminary trail map, and a definite destination. And Cooker was none the wiser. Probably forgot about the whole thing as soon as the money got him high.
Cooker didn’t believe a fucking word that Shitburger had said. He hadn’t trusted the hacks inside, he sure as fuck wasn’t going to start now. Bird-watching, his hairy, misshapen ass. Dumbshit couldn’t lie worth a damn. Just the same, he was pretty sure Shitburger wasn’t no terrorist neither. Whatever his angle was—maybe arms theft and sales—Cooker smelled money. He had two hundred and seventy-five in his pocket. And if Shitburger was handing out three-bills-minus that easy, there was more at the end of that motherfucking rainbow.
Cooker worked the grill on autopilot, cooking up Scrams and Slams, sandwiches, and burgers until the end of his shift. He couldn’t stop thinking about the money in his pocket and that map of the Chocolate Mountains.
He hadn’t told Harry that during his time at the Proving Ground, he had spent most it gacked out at the Laguna Airfield. Fact was, Cooker couldn’t remember shit-all from when he trained there. He did know that the area Shitburger was interested in was nothing but rock. What could be out there?
When Cooker clocked out, instead of heading back to the windowless room he rented in Yuma, he went to the small books
tore in town. Browsing the aisles, he found a map of the area. He stared at the wavy lines depicting the elevations of the Chocolate Mountains, tapping his finger on the spot that Shitburger was trying to reach.
He asked the girly dude at the counter for a phone book, but as soon as it was in his hands, he realized he was in the wrong county. He had nothing else to do, so he got on his hog.
It took Cooker a half hour to find a pay phone once he got to Blythe. Motherfucking cell phones, he thought. Some of us still use dimes. He flipped through the hanging phone book, avoiding the pages that looked like someone had wiped their ass on them. There was only one Schmittberger listed. He memorized the address, but to be double sure, he tore out the page and stuffed it in his pocket.
Ricky waited for the little biker to finish using the phone. Other than a bank over at the truck stop, it was the only pay phone in Blythe. That made it extremely popular, often with a line three or four deep. The worst was when you got behind a guy using all his calling-card minutes to talk to every one of his relatives back in Mexico.
The biker wasn’t even using the phone, just reading the phone book, but he had been there first and Ricky wasn’t in any hurry. Besides, the guy had that look. One of those little dogs that thinks he’s a big dog.
After the guy ripped out a page, he turned, gave Ricky a tough-guy nod, and walked to his motorcycle. Ricky was glad he hadn’t rushed him. He wasn’t physically imposing in any way—Ricky probably had eighty pounds on him—but there was something about the confident way he carried himself.
Ricky punched in the first three numbers, but stopped when the biker’s motorcycle roared to life, massacring the silence in a fifteen-block radius. Ricky waited until the engine had faded in the distance and then slowly pressed the rest of the buttons, reading the numbers off the torn piece of paper in his hand. The electronic tone rang in his ear.
