My best friend here is a guy named William from Philadelphia. We call him Penn. He calls me Beach ’cause he thinks everyone from South Jersey must live right on the ocean. I don’t mind, though. Having a nickname makes us seem more like a bunch of guys getting ready to play baseball.
So far, we run drills, play cards, clean our guns, and sleep when we can. I guess that’ll all change in a few days, though. But don’t worry … I’ll be fine. I’ll be home before the next Phillies season starts. But you got to watch them for me this year, OK? Take good care of Mom and Dad—and say hi to the neighbors.
Yours from the runway,
Dixon
Malcolm came over today after lunch
to help me finish my chores.
Now here we are on the bench before
Miller’s grocery store, sucking down
Fudgsicles, watching the traffic,
glancing through the South Jersey News.
Even though it’s over one hundred degrees,
it feels like heaven to me: I’m off from
the diner, I have a whole two hours free.
“Look at this,” Malcolm says, nudging me,
pointing the nearly empty stick of his Fudgsicle
at the picture on the front page. The photo
shows a pair of blood-covered Marines
being dragged by their buddies toward
a waiting chopper. Both guys look pretty
bad. “How can I believe in a God that puts
my brother in the middle of that?” he asks.
I don’t answer. Not because I don’t want to …
but because I don’t know how. Since Mom left,
we haven’t been back to Willowbank Episcopal,
where she and Dad were married and where
Denise and I were baptized. I hadn’t
thought about God all that much until Gramps …
and until this summer, when it seems like—
given the total mess we humans have made—
even God could be forgiven for taking an
extended vacation. (That’s what I’d do, too,
in His place.) But it’s different for Malcolm,
being a minister’s son and all. He still goes
to church each week, but he’s been mad
at God ever since Dixon left for Vietnam.
And can you blame him? I study the photo
of those bloody (and young!) Marines,
who are sons and brothers, uncles and cousins
to people just like Malcolm and me. When
I can’t stand it anymore, I flip quickly
to page three and read our horoscopes
silently. “What’s it say?” Malcolm wants
to know. I lick the last of my Fudgsicle
from the stick and read our future (we’re
both Scorpios) according to Zodiac Sally:
“You will be repaid for your sacrifice.
Be patient. See things through to the end.”
I look up at Malcolm, whose toothbrush
eyebrows are raised in amazement.
We have hit a layer of shale
and some huge tree roots.
Before we dig any further, we bring
the metal detector with us
to the church, strap the battery pack
and headphones on Carolann,
and wait beside the hole. Tonight
the full moon glows like a piece of
pirate gold. We don’t even need
our flashlights. And the sound coming
through the instrument is so loud,
we don’t even need to ask her
what she hears. Carolann unstraps the
battery pack and goes to stand watch.
I start to tell Malcolm what I think:
We’ll need a hacksaw (at least)
to cut through these roots and maybe
something even stronger to blast
through that shale…. But I don’t
finish. Instead, I stand safely back
from Malcolm—my quiet, introspective friend—
who is already thrusting his shovel
against both of these things, cursing
like a drunken pirate, digging like
Dixon’s life depended on it.
We dig almost every night this week.
Sometimes one of us stays home
for extra sleep.
On Friday, the three of us meet.
Malcolm brings the measuring tape.
After all this time, the hole is still less than
three
feet
deep,
and still no sign of treasure.
Carolann shines her flashlight over
my shoulder while Malcolm and I poke,
with a pair of birch branches,
the few places at the bottom
that aren’t covered in shale or tangled in roots.
We find only one spot
where the dirt seems soft and easy to remove.
I lie flat on my belly, reach in and scoop
handfuls of sandy soil, place them on top
of the layer of shale, until
all three of us see, clear as that last full moon,
the outline of a mermaid
engraved on a band of iron.
Nothing could have prepared us
for this.
Nothing anyone could have said
or done
could have prepared us for
this long-haired, fish-tailed lady
engraved in iron
at the bottom of a big pit of dirt
that we’ve been digging by hand
for almost six weeks.
Anyone spying on us
would see three zombies.
We look like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote
in that long, long minute
after he’s hit by some rocket,
but just before he falls into the canyon, that long, long minute
when he’s still as a stone but knows he’s going
down.
We’ve been digging now for so long
without finding anything
that digging, digging, digging, and not finding
anything
has become normal.
Now that we’ve actually found
something
that looks like the top of a treasure chest,
something
that looks like it might actually be the booty
lost by Captain Kidd
at the
bottom
of the Mullica River
sometime
in the early summer
of 1699,
now that we have actually found that…
what should we do?
At nine o’clock the next morning
we meet at the church.
Nobody has slept. We don’t say much.
Carolann paces the sidewalk awhile,
then reads her new Nancy Drew.
Malcolm hums some blues tunes
and tosses rocks across the parking lot.
I try aiming my kaleidoscope
at the stained glass windows, but it doesn’t
look any different unless the sun shines right
into them. The truth is,
we are afraid to go back and look at the hole
we left there late last night,
carefully covered in loose dirt, plastic,
and leafy branches
and protected with the fallen tree,
the hole with the mermaid carved in iron
at the bottom.
We stay there all morning.
Finally, I say: “OK. We have to get
a grip on this… we found something, but it’s
stuck under a lot of rocks and roots
we can’t move. So … let’s meet tonight at eight-forty-five
in Carolann’s family’s van,
and
let’s make a plan.”
We stagger separately to our homes.
I lie down on my bed,
point my kaleidoscope at the ceiling light,
watch the patterns scatter, the pieces
slide apart and come back together
in ways I hadn’t noticed before.
Part 7
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.
—from “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”
by James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot
This would have been my parents’
twentieth wedding anniversary.
Instead, Dad is working late at Glassboro State
grading freshman equations,
and my mother is somewhere
in her new life,
which is somewhere she doesn’t want us to know.
Feeling sorry for myself, I eat three
bowls of Cap’n Crunch cereal (the free
“surprise inside” is a tiny plastic treasure chest;
I am not amused) and watch the Phillies
play the Atlanta Braves on NBC.
Outside on the porch,
Denise and Harry are talking and smoking.
When Denise leaves for her evening shift
and Harry for his peace-rally meeting
in Princeton,
I shut off the TV (my mood has improved: the Phillies
are winning in the seventh inning)
and head across the street.
The VW van is gone. “My mom took it to a meeting
in Dennisville,” Carolann explains.
She points toward the house. “And Dad
has his buddies over to watch the game.”
The evening air is sticky. Big drops begin to hit
the sidewalk like they do just before
a summer downpour.
Malcolm arrives on his bike.
“You OK with going to the diner?” I ask him.
The rain falls harder now.
“It’s cheap and close by, and we can use the jukebox
in the booth to cover our talk
about the treasure,” I tell him.
(Denise, I’m hoping, will be too busy waiting tables
to bother us. And Mr. Archer
won’t even be there.)
Malcolm looks up the street
as if he could see the diner from here.
He nods reluctantly. “Yeah. I guess so….”
Carolann sits on the handlebars of his bike.
I jog alongside.
Eight minutes later we are at the front
door of the Willowbank Diner
being greeted by Mr. Archer himself. Great.
“Hi, Boss,” I say as cheerfully and politely as I can,
anticipating his reaction
to Malcolm.
“A booth in the back for three, please.”
Outside, it’s raining in sheets. Thunder claps, rolls.
A family with two kids and a baby bursts in
from the street, squeezing behind us.
Mr. Archer glares at me from the podium.
He shuffles the pile of menus,
deciding what he’ll do.
We stand there, dripping wet, waiting.
My lips are still warped in a grin,
but my hands are sweaty,
my stomach knotted up tight.
Malcolm tugs on my sleeve. I ignore him.
If Mr. Archer is a bigot, he’ll have to
go public with it, here and now.
Finally, he puts the menus down.
Jeez … He really IS going to turn
three kids out in the pouring rain … just because
one of us is black!
A brown-skirted waitress with an apron
moves between us and Mr. Archer.
“I got these three, Boss,” she says efficiently,
grabbing up menus from his podium
and urging us quickly
down the aisle between tables.
We follow her to the booth
in the farthest-back corner of the diner.
Except for the whap-whapping of the kitchen door
when it closes and opens again,
it’s quiet, private—
away from eavesdroppers and disapproving eyes.
Malcolm and Carolann slide in
one side, I slide in the other.
The waitress hands us each a menu.
“Thanks, Denise,” I say, completely stunned
by what she’s just done. She hands me
a towel from her apron. “You three look like wet rats….”
We pass it around, drying our arms and faces.
Denise waves her notepad in the air
and turns toward the front
of the diner. “I’ll come back for your orders
in just a minute,” she calls over her shoulder.
“I thought you said she’s always getting you
into trouble,” Malcolm says, his voice shaky
from our Mr. Archer encounter.
“She was… is… DOES …,” I reply.
“This is definitely strange behavior
for my sister….”
Malcolm folds the towel, pushes it across
the table. “Well, guess what?” His voice is firmer now.
“Your sister’s ’strange behavior’
just got me a seat in this diner
for the first time ever.”
(five kinds of ice cream, six toppings, nuts,
extra whipped cream) and four spoons.
Despite my objection,
Malcolm insists that Denise should sneak
back to our booth on her break
to share it.
After Denise helps us eat
way too much ice cream, she goes back to waiting
tables out front. Overdosed on sugar, we put
some nickels in the jukebox and listen to Otis Redding,
Steppenwolf, and the Rascals while we try to decide
what to do about the chest.
Carolann does most of the talking:
“None of us are very good with tools,
besides shovels, that is….
And even if we did have something
to cut through the roots,
to blast through that shale,
how would we do that and not
destroy
whatever is really down there?”
Carolann, I believe, reads
too many mysteries. But in this case, I think she’s right.
So does Malcolm. “If Dixon were here,
we could ask him to help. He could get special saws
and other stuff for us
from the lumberyard. He might not even ask
why we need it….”
His voice trails off. “But anyway, he’s not here….”
Someone drops a plate in the kitchen.
There’s shouting and cursing. A busboy
hurries past.
I fold
and refold my napkin
into something that looks like
a tricornered pirate’s hat,
which I place gently on Malcolm’s head.
He grins. “What’s that?”
“It’s your thinking cap. You knew
what the brass key was to
and what the metal detector was for….
I figure if we encourage your brain
just a little bit more,
you’ll figure out what we should do
to free that treasure.”
We stay at the diner till almost
eleven, kicking around ideas for
raising the chest. First Malcolm suggests
some sort of pulley, made of thick rope
and a k
ind of hand-cranked crane.
While on the juke, Otis Redding sings,
“Sittin’ on the dock o’ the bay, wastin’ time …,”
Malcolm draws his vision of a homemade
winching system on half a napkin.
“I’m thinkin’ that maybe the force of it
lifting might break through those roots
and that shale—and then we wouldn’t need
to dig down from the top with any heavy-duty
tools.” For a few minutes, we are
convinced. Then Carolann asks, “OK,
but how—exactly—do we get the ropes
underneath the chest in the first place?”
Malcolm sighs. He reaches across the
table and puts the napkin pirate hat
on Carolann. “Your turn—my brain’s
tired!” I get up to call Dad on the
pay phone. “I’m fine … I’m at the diner,
and Denise is watching me like a hawk,”
I assure him. On the way back
to our booth, I pass the employee
bulletin board, where we thumbtack
messages about switching shifts and
reminders for the busboys and the cooks.
The line of little magnets stuck
around the metal edge gives me an idea.
“How about a giant magnet?” I propose when I
sit down again. “Maybe we could find one
that’s strong enough to pull on the metal
parts and—if we’re lucky—we can lift it
out of there without wrecking it.”
My friends consider this. “It’d have to be
a really, really, really big magnet,” Carolann
declares. “That chest is old, so even if it’s not
full of silver and gold, it’s probably heavier
than you are.” She’s right again, of course.
(Jeez, I hate that. I feel like maybe I
need to read more mysteries….)
Another hour passes. We order a piece