The kinder, friendlier military pretends it has softened. It pretends its fists aren’t clenched. It pretends it’s not ready to smash down upon you with blinding and ferocious power.
In short, the color of the carpet might be pretty, but it still tastes the same when a man in uniform drives your face into it.
The color of the carpet rubbing up against Chris’s face was a deep forest green. It tasted like plastic and dirt, a bit of sweat and maybe just a taste of urine.
He cursed Jose for staying outside.
From behind the elbow pressed into the back of his head, a voice said, “The lieutenant colonel wanted to make sure you didn’t leave before speaking with him.”
Chris may have led the way to the conference room, but the burley man behind him was certainly steering. When the door slammed behind him, though, Chris looked up to see this was no generic conference room. It was an office, with three chairs around a desk, two smaller ones for the visitors and a larger one in plush leather for the soldier. He recognized the photos on the wall, pictures of camaraderie and victory and good will and all that stuff that sells the new recruits, but there was one man at the center of all of them, and he had an awfully familiar face.
Chris sat down in the good chair and positioned himself to look out the window at the skyline but still keep the corner of his eye on the door. He leaned back until he worried he’d tip, and then he shoved a cigar in his mouth and lit a match.
The door swung open, and a voice said, “There’s no smoking in here.” Chris brought the match to his cigar and, through gritted teeth, said, “There is if you want to talk to me.”
He heard the click of a pistol being cocked, but he went about the business of lighting his tobacco.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” Chris said.
There was another click, and the voice said, “You are right about that.”
Chris smiled and puffed hard on his cigar. And then a flash of silver streaked in front of his face. He turned away from the door to see his cigar pinned against the wall by a standard issue Army knife. Chris sat forward slowly with his hands in full view.
“So, should I call you Lieutenant Colonel?” he asked. “Or should I call you Dad?”
A fully-uniformed Lt. Col. Josiah Billows strode up to the desk.
“I don’t figure you’ll be staying long enough to call me either.”
Chris stood, and the two men stared at each other in as uncomfortable a silence as they could muster. Chris broke the silence.
“Why is your birthday written on these letters from Grandpa’s study?”
The colonel looked at the paper and thought for a short second.
“That may be my birthday, but that’s not why he wrote it down. It’s his account number at his bank uptown. The old fool never remembered that it was my birthday too.”
Chris stared hard at the letter. He could see the differences between the handwriting of Randal Lewis, the author of the letters, and the script used to ink those numbers.
“But,” Chris asked, “why would he write it here?”
The colonel turned his back. “You could ask him if the damn fool hadn’t gone and gotten himself killed in some godforsaken hole where no one would ever find him.”
Chris looked around the office.
“Looks like you’ve finally settled down,” he said. “I wonder if it makes mom feel better that you would have been there for her eventually.”
Josiah spun back around and slammed his fist on the desk and shouted, “You’ve certainly got all the answers for someone who was only a child when the questions were being asked.”
Chris wriggled the knife until it came free from the wall.
“I suppose your right,” he said, flipping the blade in his hand. “I was too young to know what was happening when we lost Mom, but do you really know how old I was when you lost the rest of your family?”
He laid the knife on his father’s desk and walked toward the door.
“I suppose you’re going to follow after him… him and his ‘you are the answer’ line he used on you so often,” the colonel said, “and you’ll probably get yourself killed in the process too.”
Chris turned his head. “What of it?” he asked.
Josiah pulled a chain from around his neck. “You’ll need that at the bank,” he said. At the end of the chain was a key, very old and very plain. Chris nodded and left, walking in silence until he reached the street.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For as long as he had been waiting on the sidewalk, Jose still resisted his urge to immediately ask questions. They nodded to each other in silence, even as pedestrians strode past them and between them and around them.
Chris still had the chain with the key in his hand, but he reached now to put it in his ever-present satchel, alongside the letters and the box and the pipe.
A hand landed on Chris’s shoulder, and he heard someone chuckle.
“Hey buddy,” the voice said, “nice purse.”
The face that went with the voice was unshaven and unwashed. He had bits of trash stuck in the beard, a cracked plastic cup in his hand, and a general smell of vomit, exhaust and roasted squirrel. Chris noticed nothing but the hand on his shoulder and that shit-eating grin.
He swung his fist as if he could punch the hobo through the wall and into his father. The bum failed to even hit the wall, but he flew backward into a trashcan, knocking it over.
A few passersby stopped to scoop up the refuse and return it to the uprighted trashcan. Most kept walking without pausing their conversations with their cell phones. A few even stepped over the homeless man who was now part of the streetscape. They had places to go, and this was one of the nicer resolutions the city had seen.
Chris stepped over to the guy he punched out and pulled him up by the hand. As the man scuttled about to pick up any tattered clothes he may have dropped, Chris turned to walk uptown. He turned his head to find Jose.
“You as hungry as I am?” he asked.
New York lacks nothing, especially places to eat. Any doorway is a potential gateway to exquisite cuisine, but Chris didn’t enter any of them. He walked up to the nearest hot dog vendor and ordered one with kraut and mustard.
“You know those things are almost as filthy as the pretzels in Philadelphia,” Jose said.
“That’s what gives them their flavor,” Chris said through a mouthful of stale bread and pork product. “Hot dogs are one of those simple pleasures,” he added, starting to stroll north along the street, “just like a smile from a pretty woman and going with Grandpa to the bank. He’d pick me up from school every Monday to go to the bank with him and grab a hot dog along the way. You know, I swear that’s where the whole thing about me being the answer started. I’ve missed those days ever since he and Granny moved to New Mexico, but I understood him wanting to be closer to his work.”
Jose walked alongside him, working on his own hot dog and wishing he had thought to grab a soda too, although he was glad that looking for the next street vendor gave him a distraction from Chris’s ramblings.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There had been a definite upswing in style since the last time Chris had been to the bank, barely able to see over the counters but tall enough still to see the basket of suckers just out of reach. Then, it had been nothing but orange and brown and yellow shag everywhere. Now it was the nondescript, non-offensive boring white and light blue everywhere. But certainly the computers were a welcome addition from a system that relied on files and organization and memory and lots of valuable space wasted on paper.
Chris didn’t know what to expect, so he asked for the manager. Better to wait now, he thought, than to wait later. An older woman walked over, smiling from the moment she appeared. Her gray hair was short, curly and playful, setting off a youthful exuberance that belied her age. Chris gave her the account number.
“Theodore Billows!” the manager exclaimed. She looked up suspiciously. “But you’re much too young to be him.”
Chris gave the standard look he perfected in the months following his grandfather’s disappearance, a measured combination of grief and condolence, recognizing their loss as well as his own.
“Oh,” she said, quickly crossing herself, “but that must make you little Chrissy. You used to come in and ask so politely for the purple suckers. You probably don’t remember me.”
The light bulb going off over his head lit Chris’s face.
“I do remember that smile,” he said. “I remember the pretty lady who always smiled.”
Jose, who had been standing so quietly off to the side, jabbed Chris in the shoulder to bring him back to the present.
“Oh, yeah,” Chris said, breaking away from the memory, “did my grandfather have a safe deposit box or something here?”
The woman tapped at the keyboard. “He does, but you have to answer a security question first. It’s been a while since we had these, but… oh, I remember this one. Do you have the answer to the security question?”
Chris waited. And waited. And waited.
“Well, what’s the question?” he asked.
She giggled a little, like she did all those years before.
“That was the question,” she said. “Do you have the answer to the security question?”
Chris fidgeted for a brief moment.
“Wait!” he cried. “Wait! You don’t mean me, do you? Am I the answer?”
The woman laughed, and Chris started to figure it out.
“This is what that was all about? All this time I wondered what answer I was, and I’m his pin number?”
Jose slapped him on the back.
“It’s a lot better than being his phone number,” Jose said, “or he would have had to trade you in when he moved!”
The three of them were still laughing when the safe deposit manager made his way over, but Chris still felt a little confused about the whole thing. The path along which the last few days had led at times seemed a little more than coincidental, as if his grandfather’s box had only punctuated a destiny his grandfather set out for him, but this latest puzzle piece could have just been convenience or it could have meant Grandpa had been laying out this plan for a long time. He had trouble coming up with answers, because he kept returning to the same question. What had his grandfather been doing when he disappeared?
The kindly old man was another Chris vaguely remembered from his childhood sojourns to the bank with Grandpa, but either Chris had grown, which was definitely true, or the old man had shrank, which was almost definitely true, because it now seemed as if their statures had reversed.
“I remember your grandfather,” the man said. “He was a good man, what little I knew of him, but he definitely doted on you plenty.”
His hands shook as he pulled down the box belonging to his grandfather. It was a rather large one, and as Chris reached out to help steady the box and the old man, he realized whatever was locked away had some weight to it. The old man slid the box onto a cart, despite Chris and Jose’s offers to carry it, and wheeled it into the viewing room, and he left them to their business.
Chris emptied his satchel onto the table, spreading out the box, the letters and the pipe. He was hoping a pattern might emerge. His father’s key fit the lock, and Chris held his breath as he turned it. He lifted the lid as quickly as he could, which seemed like a snail’s pace. He reached in and pulled out a rock, a large rock, but still just a rock.
He turned it over in his hands to see markings on it, but he couldn’t even tell if they were right side up, let alone decipher them. He expected to find answers, but he couldn’t seem to avoid new questions. Jose took a turn reaching into the box and found an old record, what they remembered vaguely as a 45, and a small record player.
“Walter Brennen?” asked Jose. “Isn’t that the guy that the other guy wanted naked pictures of in… in… Good Morning Vietnam!”
Chris shrugged. “That sounds right, but what does that have to do with anything?”
They found an outlet in the room, and Chris offered silent thanks to the record player for starting.
“Dutchman’s gold, oh, Dutchman’s gold…”
The record warbled about the way the boys remembered records to do if they hadn’t been treated with care, but the words came through clearly enough.
“In the Arizona desert stands a giant of earth and stone, mighty Superstition Mountain with its mystery and its gold.”
The cowboys just looked at each other.
“A miner, out prospectin’, found his fortune and his fame; found the gold of Superstition, just plain Dutchman was his name.”
The noise drew the old man back in.
“Oh, the Dutchman was a gambler, and a party was his fun, but he kept his precious secret, never trusting anyone.”
Chris noticed the old man was humming along with the music.
“And in death, he is laughing, for the grave his secret holds, and the mighty Superstition keeps the Dutchman’s yellow gold.”
Chris stopped the record.
“Do you think this is what Grandpa was after?” he asked with a bit of a grin on his face.
The old man, not realizing the importance of the moment, said, “Every time your grandfather was in here, he was whistling that tune. I’m surprised you don’t remember it.”
Chris held up the rock again. He turned it, and then turned it again, and then he saw it.
“Jose, this is a map!” he yelled, loud enough to be heard, if not totally understood, in the bank lobby. “This map goes to the treasure in the song! So the box was to hold the photo, and the photo led us to the letters, which I’ll guess are about this map and this treasure!”
He felt smug in his accomplishment for a moment, at least until he looked back down at the table.
“So what the heck is this pipe doing here?” he asked.
The old man wandered over to the table and picked up the Peterson.
“Oh, I remember this one,” the man said. “I admired this one so much that your grandfather gave me one just like it, but this one is definitely his. A Peterson Irish Free State, which would make it 1920s or ‘30s. It’s a classic billiard.”
Chris sighed. “Yes, but what does it have to do with anything else here?” he asked.
The old man looked around the table for a second and then back at Chris.
“I wouldn’t think they’d have anything to do with each other,” he explained. “Your grandfather was very fond of his pipe. Back when he was coming here, you could still smoke inside, and he invariably had a pipe in his mouth. He took such pleasure from it that he would give a pipe to anyone who showed even the slightest interest. I’m sure he just hoped you’d smoke it and enjoy it like he did.”
The old man reached into his jacket and pulled out a red pouch.
“It’s Prince Albert,” he said with a quivering voice. “It’s the same tobacco he gave me so many years ago. I’d be honored if you’d take it. I’d feel like I was paying him back somehow.”
Chris took the pouch and shook the man’s hand. He gathered the box, the letters, the photo, the stone and the record player and got them into the satchel until they at least wouldn’t fall out. Then he picked up the pipe and his new tobacco, opening the pouch and filling the bowl. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of matches. The old man ran over, gesturing as if he was telling them to keep the noise down.
He looked up at Chris and said, “I’m sorry, but you can’t smoke in here.” Chris winked at him, and the two left the bank laughing.
All content and characters are the property of the author and may not be republished or recreated without prior written consent.
Answers...or more questions?
ReplyDelete