by Lorraine Ray
Had Jan Jansen and her son paid a little more attention to their surroundings and less to their argument about the dead body, they might have seen two young immigrants from Guatemala named Mario and Estephany. Mario and Estephany left Quetzaltenango, Guatemala in July when their mother sent for them to join her and two older siblings in Ohio after twelve years separation. First, they had taken a bus to the Mexico-Guatemala border. Afterwards, they crossed the Suchiate River by inner tube and arrived in Chiapas where they stole a bicycle and pedaled to Tapachula. From there they walked 150 miles north while skirting the dangerous area of La Arrocera and arrived in Arrianga in time to hop onto La Bestia, the famous freight train that takes immigrants north. Luckily, they were not attacked with a machete while asleep and they did not fall off the train before they rode into Guadalajara. After sleeping in an alley, they got on a train to Monterrey. They tried to cross into America at Nuevo Laredo, but couldn’t find a way into the United States without paying smugglers. They retreated backwards to San Luis Potosi and to Guadalajara again. They then headed 1,000 miles to the Sonoran Desert, making a final push and evading the traffickers by a miracle and activating the cell phone for a pickup from a smuggler who was paid by their mother. They now crouched behind a palo verde tree, watching Jan and her son.
Mario put his index finger to his lips and then shrugged his shoulders. Beside him, Estephany stifled a giggle and nodded. They both peered ahead through the thick branches of green to the spot where an Anglo man and woman were jabbering.
Though the old woman standing with the younger man blabbed about a corpse under a tree, Mario and Estephany weren’t very familiar with English. It wouldn’t have mattered much anyway; the things Jan and her son were saying might have bewildered someone who spoke English well. For their part, Mario and Estephany couldn’t fathom what the two people were arguing about. Soon they gave up listening and snuck in a direct line away from the clearing.
In one hand, Mario carried something familiar to the reader! It was an old leather valise, the type with pleats on the side so it could hold lots of papers for a lawyer or a banker.
After traveling two hundred yards, the two immigrants cut back in toward a road where their relative’s car waited for them. In the far distance, the barest outline of the outskirts of Los Hombres appeared. When they reached the car, Mario and Estephany broke into a run. And they wore the biggest smiles imaginable.
13.
Los Hombres still welcomes many visitors eager to search for Teddy’s lost satchel of cash. They arrive in town, buy the maps in the gift shops for a few dollars, and follow the clues. But knowing where the peculiar millionaire went that night and who he spoke to, only gives these treasure hunters more questions and more doubts. Did Teddy hide his money in the Redburn mansion? Did he bury it outside the Methodist church? Was Teddy the man who stepped down into Big Gulch and did he stroll by Jan Jansen’s mobile home? With all the searching completed so far, there still has been no sign of Teddy’s emaciated body.
Now the reader knows the secret of what really happened to Teddy and his leather valise. That briefcase crammed full of money wasn’t buried in Big Gulch or hidden in the town church or stuffed under the staircase of his mansion, rather Teddy carried it out into the desert, dropping it shortly before he shot himself. Mario and Estephany, two young immigrants from Guatemala who were just starting their lives in America, happened upon the satchel lying on its side, halfway hidden in a blooming Globe Mallow bush. They opened the satchel and discovered piles of cash. Could there be a better ending? They found the money when they were only a few miles from their rendezvous with a ride. Imagine their surprise, and what a difference it will make for them as they start new lives with their mother in Ohio.
After hearing this last episode when Jan Jansen and her son noticed the dead immigrant woman, you might be thinking Teddy’s body will eventually be found nearby the site which Jan Jansen interpreted as an alien crash, but unfortunately, though your thoughts are logical, you’d be wrong. The number of dead immigrant women are legion; the woman Jan found was a different woman’s corpse. It was another, different dead immigrant woman, a little farther from Los Hombres, that Teddy conversed with before he shot himself. His theory that two bodies would be easier to find than one proved false. They’re both still out there.
And Josefino Armenta’s corpse, the first body found when the search party looked for Teddy, was wrapped in its black plastic body bag and carried to Tucson, shipped by plane to Guatemala City, and returned on a truck to his home town. He had forty-three relatives in the town and they all had willingly contributed to the effort of returning their brother, uncle, cousin and son. A crowd of people stood waiting when his body arrived and also when it was taken to the cathedral in the undertaker’s car. Several people wondered who it was that all those people were expecting, and when they learned of Josefino’s death in America, in the desert, they were struck with real grief. His whole family had been well-known and respected in the town for years, though this was a younger and poorer relative of the large Armenta clan. His deadly decision to join a friend in Seattle occurred only recently after he broke up with his girlfriend from another nearby town in Guatemala, and sadly he got no farther on his journey than the desert outside Los Hombres.
The second immigrant whose body was found on the search for Teddy had no ID with her. She still waits in a temporary morgue in Tucson for someone to identify her, and her corpse lies in a body bag in refrigerated limbo. In her case there is a corpse but no personality; in Teddy’s case there is a personality without a corpse.
The third dead immigrant, the one found in the clearing by Jan Jansen and her son, was also unidentifiable once the sheriff got out to it. Like the body found by the search party, this corpse is in a body bag in Tucson.
In the town of Los Hombres, the people never wised up. Though townspeople discuss what happened to Hans when the porch fell on him, and though a sensible person would think that the tragedy would make people wary of digging around the Redburn Mansion, the opposite is the case. People flock to the home to rip it apart; the ground around the mansion is riddled with exploratory holes, holes that merge with other holes, holes that have sprained quite a few ankles. Treasure hunters punched holes in the wonderful old tin ceiling tiles of the mansion and ripped up oak floorboards. The basement has been probed, the stairways undermined. A ten-foot wire fence now surrounds the property. Of course, there has been no signs of money in all that destruction, and authorities worry that the structure will collapse on someone again soon, and in fact, a decision to level the place with a bulldozer is apt to be rendered shortly by a Santa Cruz County judge in Tombstone.
Bricklayers have had much higher incomes as they’ve been employed to rebuild collapsed garden walls due to crazed treasure hunters who claim Teddy buried his loot somewhere along Big Gulch. The extent of the digging has become so troublesome that the city placed warning signs every twenty feet along the banks of the ditch, but people with shovels still prod the earth at night. Lately, the banks of other arroyos in town subsided drastically due to enormous treasure holes.
And frightening legends have begun to emerge in Los Hombres. Late at night, impressionable people claim they hear the faint sounds of someone shoveling and sighing. Numerous sightings of Teddy Redburn and Hans Zwilanski digging at night at the mansion and in Big Gulch led to a frenzy of fear about six weeks after Teddy disappeared. Paranormal experts were hired to trace Teddy’s footsteps. Occultists tried to reach him with spirit guides.
Bernie Goodson drew a new edition of his map including these new ghostly sightings, though Cate Ferguson left hers the same. Mrs. Claxton makes a nice amount from selling all the maps, but she’s disappointed with her son Jasper’s lack of interest in treasure hunting. And he’s developed a strange fear of dogs. The mayor and town council have tried to stop the manufacture of maps to the treasure; it may be a cottage industry in Los Hombres, but it’s leading to injuries!
People now analyze the town’
s every dirt scratch, burrow, and crevice for the possibility that Theodore Redburn might have hidden his loot there. Any time another body is found in the desert outside Los Hombres people in town are certain it’s Teddy Redburn at last, and off-road vehicles rush to the spot to scour the desert for the leather valise. In fact the whole town is riddled, pockmarked, and plagued with the energetic activities of hysterical money grubbers.
And in the end you’ll have to ask yourself what does remain of Theodore Pennington Redburn’s life beyond this treasure hunting frenzy? The question is a good one, though perhaps the sleepers in Las Vegas rest on well-constructed mattresses.
THE END
MEET THE AUTHOR
Lorraine Ray is an avid reader and writer. She lives in an adobe home in Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter.
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