by Johnny Shaw
But staring once again at the boards laid across the moat, Harry had second thoughts. What kind of asshole digs a moat anyway? The boards looked narrower. The moat looked wider. What would happen if one of the tires missed? If the car went into the water? Would he drown? Would he get crushed? Would he die instantly? Or would he survive, only to die of infection after several painful weeks?
Out of all the possible scenarios, there was only one good outcome (he got across) and so many bad ones (a shit-covered spear piercing his vital organs, for example). Everything wrong could happen, so little right. His life story. A crap game played with dice that only had ones and twos on them.
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“We had this conversation,” Frank said, leaning into the window of the car. “Destiny, all that. Second verse, same as the first.”
“I don’t know if my body will let me. My leg is shaking. My hands are froze to the wheel. My body, my brain is telling me not to. I’m having a freak-out here. Like a fear seizure or something. Like my body is rejecting me.”
“Take a couple breaths.”
Harry took three quick breaths. His wheeze sounded like a chain smoker in a Lamaze class. It did nothing to calm his nerves. He reached under the seat and pulled out a half-full bottle of bourbon.
“That’s the stuff. Take a drink. A good gulp,” Frank said.
Harry took a long pull. Drinking too fast, the bourbon went down the wrong tube. Harry sprayed liquor all over the windshield, the rest pouring down his chin and neck onto his shirt. He coughed, the back of his throat burning with booze and bile. His eyes watered, and heat rose to his face. It took him a solid minute to get the hacking under control. Even then, he felt like shit.
“You okay?” Frank asked.
“Went down the wrong way. Raped my lungs. Maybe it’s a sign. The wrong way,” Harry said.
“The hell. Sack up, Harry. The closer we get, the more you’re going to want to back out. This is the easy part. Everything after is going to be a hell of a lot harder. You do this, you prove you’re up for it. You don’t get across that water, you don’t deserve that gold. Quit acting the pansy, put on your man pants, and let’s go.”
Frank didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and walked over one of the boards. At the other side, he motioned with his hands for the car to move forward.
Harry coughed one last cough and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He smeared some of the bourbon off the windshield, not improving his visibility. He reached into the glove compartment and rooted around. Papers, pens, a lighter, a spark plug, a half-eaten sandwich, an apple core, a glow-in-the-dark condom. Where was it?
His Saint Christopher medallion was stuck to a Jolly Rancher. He separated them and clutched the small pendant in his hand. With hardly a conscious thought, Harry’s foot lifted slowly off the brake and the car idled forward toward the moat.
“Nobody dies in a moat. That’s not a way people die. Not anymore. Let’s do this.”
With Harry’s maps and the preprogrammed GPS unit, Ricky found the pier easily. The weatherworn wooden structure looked like it had been unused for decades.
Maneuvering the boat against the pier proved to be a challenge, the back end of the boat (aft?) not quite doing what Ricky wanted. But he was in no hurry, so he took the opportunity to learn. On the fourth try, he guided the boat parallel to the pier.
He didn’t know beyond squares and grannies, so he tied the boat with a bulky knot that looked like a monkey’s shoelace.
After an hour of moving around some supplies, Ricky stretched out on the deck. There were no clouds, only brightness. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the red glow inside his eyelids. The warmth of the sun and the peaceful rocking of the boat made it impossible for him to stay awake. His sleep was fluid and graceful.
He couldn’t remember the whole dream. He never remembered his dreams. If he was lucky, he retained scenes and images, but never the whole. He recalled a part of his dream where he was talking to an octopus-like creature with a bird’s head. The creature held a candle. It wasn’t scary. They were friends. It might have been a birthday candle. In the dream he was getting the creature’s permission to go to a surprise party. He wondered what it meant. He didn’t really believe dreams meant anything, but he had always liked how excited Flavia would get when he let her interpret his dreams. Maybe he would ask Harry.
He might have remembered more of the dream if he hadn’t been jolted awake by a burro licking his face. When a gigantic tongue that smells like fermented cheese wakes you, you tend to lose all short-term memory. At first sight the elongated burro’s face made no sense, making him unsure of what it was and what it meant.
The confusion led to momentary panic. Pure reaction. He punched the burro in the side of the head with a sweeping right hook.
Frank had the best vantage point. Everything happened fast, but like an umpire watching a bang-bang play at first base, his mind absorbed and replayed everything to interpret the details.
Minutes before, Frank and Harry had pulled up to the pier with the horse trailer. They saw Ricky sleeping on the deck and thought they’d have some fun. They quietly unloaded the burros—as quietly as one can unload a burro—and brought them over. The burros appeared curious about the boat. As one of them sniffed around, Harry gave it a little push from behind toward Ricky. That’s when the donkey licked Ricky’s face.
Ricky punched the donkey. The donkey reeled to the side and hoof-kicked Harry square in the nuts. That’s what you get for standing behind a donkey. With an echoing scream, Harry flew backward off the pier and into the water. But the donkey wasn’t done. It bit Ricky in the cheek. Ricky screamed and grabbed at the animal’s face. Harry splashed in the water toward the pier. Frank pulled the burro’s reins. Harry climbed onto the edge of the dock. The donkey stepped on Harry’s hand. He fell back into the water. Finally, Frank got the donkey under control.
The quiet that followed was tense. Everyone waited for more, the inevitable aftershock after a big earthquake.
Ricky brought his hand to his cheek. The thick teeth of the donkey had done more squeezing than biting. It felt bruised, but the bite hadn’t broken the skin.
Frank held the reins on both burros. They skittered on the pier but calmed to the point of control.
“Where’s Harry?” Ricky asked. He had been too busy being bitten to hear the splash.
Frank smiled, pointing to Harry at the edge of the pier.
“Give me a hand. My cast is getting heavier,” Harry yelled, his wary eyes on the donkey.
“How’d you get in the water?” Ricky asked.
“Stupid thing nutted me in the junk. My boys feel like bruised fruit, my stomach is queasy, and I think I broke my diddling finger.”
Ricky and Frank burst out laughing. They knew they shouldn’t, but they couldn’t stop.
“Yeah, great. Hi-larious. Now will one of my so-called friends help me out of this swamp?”
THIRTY-THREE
“Tell me about the men that took Papa Frank,” Mercedes demanded.
They were parked at the side of the road. The traffic was light, so they only got pelted with dust every couple minutes. The boys leaned against the side of their truck as their mother paced in front of them, a drill sergeant at inspection. A small furrow had formed on the ground from her pounding footsteps.
“I do not think they took him against his will,” Bernardo said.
Mercedes stopped. “They’re with him. They know where he’s at. That’s what matters. Who are they? Where do we find them?”
“The big one with the littler arm is Ricky,” Bernardo said. “Papa Frank had us watch him. A problem with drink. He would not do harm to Papa Frank. Ricky owes him. He appears to be honorable.”
“You can’t trust a drunk. The other one?”
“Harry. He is not so honorable, a schemer, a planner. Very insensitive to our native heritage.”
“He calls us the Go Go Gophers,” Ramón cut in.
Mercedes shot Ramón a glance that made three drops of urine leak from his body.
Bernardo continued. “I do not like the one called Harry, but Papa Frank does. The three of them, they are friends. They were on a search. I do not know what for. We went in a boat. They dove in the Colorado River. They found a box.”
“What was in the box?”
“I do not know.”
“These idiots pull a box out of the water and you weren’t curious?”
Bernardo looked at her, not quite understanding. “It was their box, not my box.”
Mercedes ground her teeth.
“Do you know where they live?”
“They both live in the same mobile home village in Blythe.”
“Take me there.”
“We must go by the compound first. Tuco, Blondie, and Angel Eyes have not been fed.”
“Your dogs can wait.”
“If the dogs are not fed, they will eat what is there. That would be very bad.”
Ricky didn’t know if all burros were afraid of the water or just these two. He would probably never know. What mattered was the practical challenge of getting two frightened and skittish asses over the Colorado River without incident or injury.
Harry held one by the reins. It whinnied and jerked its head. Its hooves stomped near Harry’s feet, scraping against his cast and forcing him to hop out of their way. It looked like they were dancing a jerky shimmy.
Ricky stroked the other burro, but it only reminded the animal that this was the human that had punched its head. Every third stroke, the burro attempted to bite him again. The way Ricky figured it, if the donkey was trying to bite him, it was distracted from its terror of being on the boat.
Harry poked out his head from behind the burro. He yelled to Ricky over the sound of the animal. “Hey, Ricky. How do you stop a burro from crapping?”
Ricky smiled. “I don’t know. How?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. How do you stop a burro from crapping? What’s the punchline?”
“I’m serious. This thing is leaking like a broken soft-serve machine.”
Ricky made the mistake of looking. “Thanks for ruining Dairy Queen for me.”
“Are they doing any better?” Frank yelled over his shoulder. He steered the boat downriver and toward the opposite bank.
“Who knows,” Harry said. “They’re not exactly the smartest things. They’re calm one second and then they get all squirrelly. Let’s just get to the other side.”
“How far down?” Frank asked.
“Not far. I couldn’t check the Arizona side in person. No roads leading to this dock. Nobody uses it, far as I know. Google showed it was still there, though. Maybe fifteen miles south of Cibola, which we’re coming up on.”
Harry’s burro brayed and kicked at the inside of the boat, pelting man and animal with small pieces of wood and fiberglass shrapnel. The shards made the burro kick more. Harry pulled at the reins, but it kept kicking. A hole formed in the side of the boat.
“Get this boat moving or I ain’t going to get my deposit back.”
“Maybe if we sang to them,” Ricky said.
“Get out of here,” Harry said.
“When my daughter throws a tantrum, when she gets out of control, the only thing that calms her is me singing to her.”
“That’s a little girl. She has a brain. A small one, but a brain. These are manure machines with no brains.”
“Don’t mean they don’t like music,” Ricky said.
“You got a better idea?” Frank yelled back at them.
Harry shrugged. “I don’t know many songs.”
“What songs do you know?”
Harry looked down at his feet and almost inaudibly said, “I know the words to ‘Like a Virgin.’”
“Seriously.”
“They played it over and over when it was out. Some songs you hate but you know all the words. Heard them so many times they stick. I bet you know the words.”
Ricky thought about it. “Yeah, some of them. Flavia loves Madonna.”
“Frank?” Harry yelled.
Frank’s deep voice bellowed over the sound of the engine, “I came to the wilderness. So now I made it ooh-ooh-ooh.”
Then they botched the lyrics together: “If it knew how lost it was. That’s how I ooh-ooh.”
And as the pontoon boat loaded with three slightly damaged men and two dyspeptic burros drifted down the Colorado River, an almost unrecognizable baritone chorus of “Like a Virgin” filled the otherwise silent desert landscape.
The burros didn’t kick once during the song. If you asked any of the men, they would tell you that the singing was a necessary chore and only the burros enjoyed it. They would tell you that they found no joy in it. But men are liars.
“Who is that?” Mercedes asked, standing in the dog-reek squalor of her sons’ home. She pointed at Cooker, whom she had almost mistaken for a pile of dirty clothes.
The moment she had seen the moat, she had questioned her effectiveness as a parent. But their living quarters? What had she done to create such childlike offspring? She blamed their father.
“I call him Worky. Sometimes Complainy,” Ramón responded, throwing some tacos to the dogs. Tuco and Blondie scarfed them up, but Angel Eyes ate slowly and methodically, dissecting each of his tacos and leaving the lettuce in a small uneaten pile.
Cooker tried to talk through his parched throat. Ramón gave him a can of Mountain Dew. Cooker guzzled the soda but coughed most of it back up in a Day-Glo spray. Catching his breath, he meekly sipped at what remained in the can.
“Who is he?” Mercedes pinched the bridge of her nose, attempting to stave off a headache.
“Another person that Papa Frank was helping. A drug addicted.”
“We don’t have time for this white trash skitzer. Leave him food and water. We’ve got to find your grandfather.”
“They could be anywhere,” Bernardo said.
“I know where they’re going,” Cooker said through a rasp, his teeth stained neon green.
PART FIVE: PROVING GROUND
THIRTY-FOUR
Frank, Ricky, and Harry found the decaying pier after a frustrating search up and down the Arizona side of the river. Rotted and covered in high grass, the old pier had little life left. Its ability to support a man’s weight seemed doubtful, let alone a burro with a full pack.
“Do you think it will hold?” Ricky asked.
“I didn’t get my feet crushed and crapped on for these bastard monsters to drown under a collapsed pier,” Harry said.
“Nobody plans for irony, Harry,” Frank said.
It didn’t take long before the mystery of the pier’s stability was revealed. It wasn’t scientific, but they got their answer. The moment the boat touched against the pier, the burros’ bottled-in fear took over. They leaped over the side rail onto the soggy, rotted wood. Trial by fire. Or rather, trial by burro. The pier held, and the beasts ran for ground. The wood was so soft from age, the burros left hoofprint indentations.
Being the only spry one without a leg cast, Ricky gave chase. Luckily, the burros were weighted down with supplies and only wanted to be off the boat. After some slapstick on the riverbank, Ricky got them under control.
When Frank and Harry found him, Ricky was bent over, forearms on his knees and reins in his hands. The burros chewed on some dry grass, like nothing had happened.
The three men surveyed the terrain. An expanse of undergrowth and dirt led to a group of distant hills and a stunning bajada that would act as their trail into the Chocolate Mountains and ultimately to the Big Maria Mine. They glanced back at the boat and, without any ceremony, began their journey. It wasn’t time for words. It was time to hike.
Ricky and Frank each walked alongside a burro, while Harry, due to his leg cast, rode one of the beasts. He had gotten comfortable with one crutch, but hiking on rough terrain was different than carpet. Unless his weight got to be too much for the
burro, he would ride. Frank seemed to have a lot of energy, but he could take breaks on the other burro if he got tired.
Near the river, the ground was flat and scrubby, no rocks and little incline. Hardpack, not sand. The donkeys were back to their normal calm selves, having left the terror of the boat. Harry pointed the way, GPS in one hand, folded map in the other.
The base of the mountains loomed ahead, but for now the trail was leisurely. When Frank began whistling “Heigh-Ho” from Snow White, Ricky and Harry joined in. The air felt light, the hike easy.
“How many miles?” Frank said. “We should have a goal. Some time or distance. So we know where we’re stopping. Or aiming to. Where to set up camp.”
Harry looked at his map, adjusting his balance on the back of the burro. “As the crow flies, it’s twenty-five or so miles to the mine. But we got some incline and who knows what else. Time’ll depend on conditions, the trail, whole bunch of stuff.”
Frank nodded. “Then we play it by ear. Keep an eye on the sun. On the terrain. First day’ll teach us a lot. We’re two-thirds gimp and old man, so no need to push. Ain’t in no hurry, right?”
“Let’s shoot for the base of the mountains by nightfall,” Harry said. “Those hills there. Looks doable. I’m thinking it’s going to be four days, maybe five, to the mine. But like you said, no reason to push it.”
“So in five days, we’re rich,” Ricky said to himself.
“Six, tops,” Harry said.
Frank laughed. The hiking felt easy with smiles on their faces and gold in their future. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work they go.
After two hours, they hit their first obstacle. As obstacles go, it wasn’t much. A loose chain-link fence with one strand of barbed wire curled at the top. A small once-red—now pink—sun-faded sign pathetically tried to send them on their way: GOVERNMENT PROPERTY – LIVE ORDNANCE – RESTRICTED AREA – NO TRESPASSING. Looking down the length of the fence, they could see that the sign repeated its ineffectual command every thirty yards.
