The Adventures of Latakia Billows

Episode VII: Fire and Smoke


The pile of spent matchsticks in the ashtray were starting to look like the mountain Jose was reading about, and Chris lit yet another one.

“Why can’t I get this damn thing to light!” he yelled across his porch.

He sucked at the stem of his Peterson a few times until he saw smoke, and he peered over Jose’s shoulder at the computer now attached to a small satellite dish.

“The Superstition Mountains in Arizona are the supposed location of the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine,” Jose read, “but so much of the details are fiction, speculation and exaggeration that it has become difficult to believe the historical details.”

Chris stared at a picture of the mountain with its sheer cliff faces and rocky foothills and wondered if he was sure what he was getting into.

And he puffed on his pipe.

And he got no smoke.

Again.

“Dammitall!” he yelled, and he grabbed another match.

He had gone through so many that, out of desperation, he started using the white-tipped versions, the ones that actively resist lighting, And why not? His pipe didn’t seem to enjoy being lit either. Jose ignored the outburst and kept reading.

“So there’s a Jacob Waltz,” he said, “or it might have been Weitz or Welz or Walls or Welzer or any number or names, or there might have been a few Jacobs with last names starting with ‘W’, but they find him or them dead or near dying, and he either has some of the gold on him or he tells them about the gold, but he doesn’t do a good enough job, because no one finds it.”

Chris, finally having got a match lit well, was working on getting some of that flame into the pipe.

“Why the hell didn’t I buy a lighter?” he asked.

“Because you thought matches were manlier,” the Mexican replied before continuing with the mine story. “It looks like there’s questions over whether or not this Waltz guy found a claim or stumbled onto someone else’s, or maybe someone gave him the claim or at least the location of the claim.”

“I got it going!” yelled Chris from behind Jose. “It’s smoking, and I’m not letting it go out this time!”

He puffed and puffed on the stem through his clenched teeth until the smoke was really flowing, and then he took a big sip right into his lungs. The cough that followed started a shower of unburned tobacco all over both of them. A second cough knocked the pipe loose from its perch between his incisors and canines, but it clattered on the table relatively unharmed. Jose wiped the bits of Prince Albert off his shoulders and shook off his hat before returning to his research.

“If no one can agree on any of this, how are we supposed to find it?” he asked.

Chris, fighting back another cough, wagged his finger in the air.

“If they had agreed on it, how would it still be there for us to find?”

Jose cocked his head to the side in though and then nodded it. “Good point,” he said, and he returned to the computer.

The brown cloud rising up from the dirt road seemed even more a foreboding omen than it did just days before, and Chris stared it all the way in while absentmindedly repacking his pipe.

“You know,” Jose said, “people have gone missing looking for this treasure.”

“You mean besides my grandfather?” said Chris, still fixed on the incoming car.

“Yeah, sorry, but about forty years ago, this guy named Henry Jones went missing in there, and they never found him,” Jose said.

“Well, then he never found the gold either.”

“Or maybe he found it and ran off somewhere.”

“Then it couldn’t have been much of a treasure in the first place,” Chris said, finally putting his pipe back in his mouth and reaching for a new box of matches.

The car had almost reached the house, but Chris still couldn’t make out who was inside. It was a nondescript car, a silver, maybe very light tan, foreign model, probably with average luxury, power and fuel economy from the looks of it, just like the kind you rent at the airport. His eyes told him it was another lawyer, but his gut was churning with the fear that this visit was much worse, or maybe that was just because he inhaled his pipe smoke again.

The black combat boots that hit the ground when the car door opened almost looked intimidating. It might have been the car they were coming out of, but they looked a little feminine. Long, black braided hair and a dark face, partially hidden by wraparound sunglasses, emerged above the window. She was beautiful and haunting and Chris was more nervous now than he was when he didn’t know who was in the car.

“I figured it was about time I see what kind of hell hole you left me for,” Asia said, shouting over the breeze. “I don’t know if I’m happy or sad that I don’t see a woman’s touch anywhere about this shack.”

Chris clamped his jaw around the stem, more to hold his tongue than the pipe. He wasn’t really scared of her, but he didn’t want to hit a woman, and he definitely didn’t want to be hit by one. Even dressed in jeans and a loose T-shirt, she still looked more like the boxer Chris met in New York than the academic he left nine years earlier.

“So have you had any feminine beauties grace your doorstep?” she asked.

Chris pried open his teeth just enough to ask, as politely as possible, “Is there a reason you came here, other than to continue the abuse you dished out in the city?”

Asia looked him squared up with him and looked dead in his eyes.

“I’m going with you,” she said. Chris balked.

“Going with me where?” he asked, trying to sound as bewildered as he could.

“Did you forget I translated that box,” she asked, “and that I still know you well enough to know you’re going after whatever your grandfather was trying to find?”

Chris still tried to maintain some pretense, though he was running out of excuses.

“And what makes you think you can help?”

She ran her fingers along his cheek, soft and sweet, and then she jabbed him right in the bruise under his eye.

“Do you forget who gave you that?” she asked. “Do you forget your grandfather probably had a reason for using a box carved in a language you don’t understand? And one that I understand?”

Chris started to retort, but he was stunned into silence by Jose speaking up from his seat in the shadows.

“At least you know she’s tough,” Jose said, “first hand.”

Asia laughed and punched Chris in the arm.

“Looks like we’re taking three,” she said. “Now where are we going?”

Jose turned back to the computer. He figured that, by the end of the week, the other two would be killing each other or sleeping together. Either way, he made a mental note to pack earplugs.

Chris managed to get a bit of smoke flowing from his bowl of Prince Albert, and he puffed hard to keep it going. He held two fingers and a thumb around the bowl until they got a little tender from the heat, switching, then, to a cigar grip that he had practiced often on his cheap cigars. Still he continued to puff, and while the pipe didn’t start glowing red, the tobacco screamed in pain by turning bitter on him.

Chris wrinkled his face and turned the pipe upside down, dumping it over the railing of the porch. His pocket bulged with a tin he found hiding in his regular cigar shop, and, in desperation for something more accommodating, he pulled it out.

The biplane on the label made him think of adventure, while somehow calming him at the same time. He tried to wrap his mouth around the brand name.

“Gaiwath? Gowith? Gahwith? Goh…”

“Go smoke it already and leave us alone,” Asia hollered over her shoulder.

She and Jose were huddled over the computer, close enough that there was no need to speak loudly, and therefore no reason Chris should have been able to hear it. He had become so preoccupied with his smoking that he had forgotten the others were planning his treasure hunt. That was fine, because he couldn’t stop trying to figure out if he was saying that name right.

He pressed his fingertips into the lid’s lip and pulled, but it did not give. He pulled harder with no success. He tucked his fingernails around the lip but only succeeded in pulling them, a little painfully, away from the skin.

Chris’s eyes darted around the porch for something to help him, and his eyes fell on the hilt of his machete. He put the tin down on the table and drew the blade from its sheath. He thrice twirled it in his right hand, switched to his left for three more, and shifted back to the right. He stared at the tin, pondering the best way to open it, and then he gave it a shot. With a flare that no one noticed, he swooped up the tin, tossed it in the air, catching it between the flat of the blade and his left hand. Then he awkwardly attempted to jam the point of the machete under the lip of the tin’s lid and pry it off, looking much like a wounded duck in the process, and he was just in time for Asia to turn and spot him.

“Maybe you should take up ballet again,” she jabbed. “You’ve definitely lost any grace you had.”

Chris dropped the tin on the table and jabbed his knife into it in frustration. He was about to offer his snappiest comeback since the two had reunited, but a whisper of releasing air caught his ear. With curiously delicate hands, Chris wiggled the blade free from the table to which it had pinned the tin. The lid lifted with the machete, leaving only the ribbon cut tobacco, gratefully offering itself for sacrifice by fire.

But this tobacco was different than the last, sweet and smoky and rich. His pipe gladly accepted this new varietal, and he held it between his teeth as he struck the match. With eager puffs, he brought the tobacco to a light. Of course, it took no time before Chris’s impatient draws had his tongue burning along with the leaf.

Disgusted with himself, Chris put his pipe on the table and wandered over to the computer, where the others were doing the work he should have been doing.

“These other rocks definitely look like maps,” Jose said, looking at picture of four square stones, two heart stones and one cross, “but why would you put a date on something you never intended anyone else to find? Why would you instruct someone to study the labels and drawings if only you were going to use it? So I say these are fake.”

“I’ll make the same point I’ve been making,” Asia retorted. “If any of these maps or clues or whatever on the Internet were true, someone would have found the treasure.”

Jose spun in the chair to look at her directly.

“But my point,” he said, “is that these stones are so widely accepted for a reason, and it might be that they are just an adaptation of actual history, where a rock did lead the way.”

Asia put her hand behind his neck and leaned down, her face inches from his.

“That’s the longest way you could have gone to say you think our rock is probably real.”

Jose spun away from the intensity of her eyes.

“I won’t argue that,” he said, “so let’s try to overlay our rock and see where it takes us on the map.”

Chris turned back to his pipe. The Billows men were never planners. They were interpreters and adventurers and improvisers. All except his father, that was, who preferred his skies to be white or gray or beige and made of wood fibers.

The men who shared that Peterson also shared a desire to live and lead and never look back. And suddenly, Chris realized two things. First, he realized he was mentally rambling, and then, in his mind, he rambled about his ramblings. And second, he realized his ramblings had taken his mind off his pipe, which seem to be smoking quite well and gave him a satisfying flavor. He began a celebration in his head, but it ended quickly when the smoke alarm that once was his girlfriend let him know what she thought of his new hobby.

“God, you stink,” Asia spat at him, but he only puffed out his chest.

“That stink,” he said, “is the latakia, and you’ll be pleased to know I’ll be smoking it from here on out.”

As Asia waved her hand past her nose, Chris reflected on his latest decision. The tobacco was decent, maybe even good. He definitely didn’t hate it, but he wasn’t yet certain he liked it. He did like that he could taste the tobacco and not just the ash and burning tongue. And he also liked that Asia hated it, and for that reason alone, he dubbed this his new favorite tobacco and vowed to get more of it before they set out.

“Just call me Latakia Billows,” Chris said.

Jose tugged at Asia’s arm and whispered, “Ten bucks says he’s sick of that nickname within a week.”

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