The End of FUN (29 page)

“I'm standing there by the fountain drinks, getting some Sparkl*Juice
™
. And when I look back I see that she's coming over to the drinks, too, and it's like,
Oh, crap, here she comes! What's she gonna do?! What am I gonna do?!
So I put my lid on my drink, bro, real smooth, and I say to her—I say, ‘The Sparkl*Juice
™
is a little flat'—and she looks at me and doesn't say a word, she just smiles. But, bro, it was the
best
kind of smile. And talk about…” He cupped his hands gently in front of his chest, like a man cradling two baby bunnies.

“Enchiladas at El Capitan! And you wanted me out in the desert with semaphore flags?”

“Same thing happened last week. I was at Mass, and there was this
other
woman sitting in the next pew up. The reading was from one of Paul's letters to the Corinthians—I remember because I was thinking,
Dude can really talk some shit when he wants to
. He was going on and on about the providence of God, just laying into them Corinthians. And then I saw the woman. When she got up for communion, you should've
seen
the jeans she was wearing. That rose on the back pocket must've been stitched to her butt cheek. As she's coming back down the aisle and I'm pretending to pray, she does the same thing—smiles at me. What's up with that?”

“You've been going to
church
, too?”

“No one's going to beat me in the house of God, bro. Not even Los Ojos de Dios.” Oso peered down at my labors. “Nice work, by the way. I hope you're prepared, though. Because this whole enterprise is about to get a lot more
fun
.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. The paradigm is about to shift, my friend.”

Oso knelt, unzipped his duffel, and extracted three black metal objects: two lengths of tubing, and a sort of a plate thing.

“By the way,” he said, “you know that gesture I made a second ago?”

“What's that?”

“The
gesture
, bro. Two scoops of vanilla ice cream.” He held out his palms. “How long you think guys been doing this for?”

“I don't know. A long time?”

“You bet your ass! I bet they did it in pioneer times. And the Renaissance. Bet you could bust it out for old Saint Paul and he'd know what you were talking about.
Cavemen
probably did it. It's a universal gesture.”

I tried the gesture out. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Oso stood there, scrutinizing my hands. “But see, bro, I like to do it a little different. I like to give 'em a little bounce, like they've just fallen out of her bra.”

Oso finished assembling the device and held it up for me to see.

“Belongs to my little cousin.
Belonged
, I should say. My aunt was going to throw it out, so I took it. I had a feeling that someday it might come in handy. And here we are! Know what they call that?”

“A metal detector?”

“
Providence
, bro. But yeah, it's a detector of metal, all right—let's see what it can do!”

He flipped the switch to ON, and the machine began to emit a loud, high-pitched squeal, a harsh mix of overtones, like:

EEEEEEEEEEE!

He twisted the knob—there was only one knob—but no matter how he tuned it, or where he aimed the plate, the squeal did not change in pitch or volume. It just went
EEEEEEEEEEE!

“Does that mean it's found something?” I asked.

“Not sure.”

“Is it broken?”

“Don't know. First time.”

EEEEEEEEEEE!

“Can I do something? Can I help? Maybe the batteries are low?”

“Nah, bro. The batteries aren't low.”

Oso swept the machine over the ground, down into the holes, around the tree—but the sound would not stop.

EEEEEEEEEEE!

“How do you know the batteries aren't low?”

“Because I just put some in!”

EEEEEEEEEEE!

Oso paced around the tree, sweeping the machine here and there, adjusting the distance from the earth, but still the sound would not stop. It was
terrible
—some kind of electric banshee. He walked further and further into the brush, and pretty soon he was dancing, stomping his feet and turning in a circle and swinging the thing like a ribbon around him. Like a Mayfair jig. He danced up a rise and down the other side until I couldn't see him anymore—and when he returned, the sound had stopped.

The little plate dangled from a cord. He walked up to the Russian olive, raised the detector to his shoulder, and swung it through the air a couple times like a batter warming up.

“We got three options here, bro. Option A: there's high metal content in the soil. What's the ground like around here? You run any tests?”

“No—but I don't think it's any different than anywhere else.”

“OK, option B: there's a psycho-magnetic disturbance, like we're standing in some vortex. Have you looked at a compass? Does it spin in a circle?”

“Um, not to my knowledge.”

He nodded. “Of course, there's always option C.”

“What's option C?”

Oso took a couple more practice swings, and for a moment I thought he was going to bang it against the tree, but at the last second he swiveled his torso around and hucked the detector out into the air. Oso is a big guy, and he has a good arm on him. The detector arced high into the sky, diminishing in lazy somersaults, and for a moment it seemed to pause against the blue—frozen at its apex—before dropping to the earth and landing with a
thunk
in the brush.

“Option C,
mi amigo
, is that that thing is a piece of shit. How about I help you dig for a while?”

There was only enough room in the hole for one person. I shoveled up the dirt, filled a bucket, and Oso lifted the bucket out of the hole. It went fast with two people, and before long we had a pretty good-sized hole. From the bottom looking up it was impressive—if you squatted down and got the right angle, that is.

But still no treasure. We took a short break, which turned into a long break, and ended up shooting the shit for the rest of the afternoon.

I had a question:

“Hey, you know that girl you saw at El Capitan? You said she had on a tie-dye? Did she have long brown hair?”

“Yeah! That's right! You know her?”

“Well, maybe.”

I told him about Shiloh.

Oso's eyes widened.

“The legendary Latham sisters! You telling me I spotted one in the wild and didn't even know it?! Wow. But now that you say it, yeah, it
was
one of them. I'd say the hottest one of the bunch. Definitely hotter than Savannah.”

“Really? You think? Savannah's the oldest one, right? What about Shawna?”

“Shawna? You serious? Shawna is near the bottom of my list, bro.”

This was territory we'd covered before. The old Latham Sister Archetype Dilemma—like the dilemma you feel when opening a package of new QuadStuff
™
DoubleStak
™
Oreo Cookies (YAY!)—like which delicious cream-filled wedge are you going to eat first?

It's like this: growing up in Mormon country you begin to notice that with large families, certain genetic traits become more evident with the repetition of children. In the Lathams' case, there were two basic templates. First, you have the more angular but also mousier model, who takes after Sam's mother, and then there's the rounder-faced, wide-eyed model, who I tended to favor. Both were beautiful in their own way, and I guess you could imagine it as a bell curve, with the middle portion—the averages—being debatable, and either end of the curve—the extremes—being more or less beyond dispute. Like, Oso and I could both agree that Shiloh was hot. And then at the other end you had poor Sally.

But I wasn't interested in Sally or Shiloh—or Savannah, or Shaley, or Shawna, or any of them. I told Oso about how Katie had come by, our little moment in the kitchen.

“There was a spark. I felt it. I know I did.”

“The light in the monkey,” he said.

“What?”

“It's something my uncle says. ‘There's a light in the monkey.'”

“I don't get it.”

“Me either. It's kind of like a Mexican zen koan. I think it maybe has to do with you being the monkey and that spark you felt could be the light. Or maybe you are both the light
and
the monkey? There's room for interpretation, bro. But you kind of know it when you feel it, right? Like you and that girl.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

So ended my seven days of digging. Where was the treasure? Seven days gone. Seven days nothing. In seven days God created everything, all the planets and stars and birds and trees and monkeys and people. And me? I dug three holes.

The next day I drove into town to see my sister.

YAY! for the
Daily Intelligencer
newspaper, whose award-winning, in-depth coverage of quilting circles and traffic accidents is delivered twice weekly to the greater Antello County area. The offices were in an old building downtown, and when I got there Evie was doing a phone interview, so I had to wait. There were a couple back issues of the
Daily
on a table, and I flipped through them. It was strange. A real, physical
paper
newspaper. The news was kind of interesting, though—like for example, this thing they were calling “Jamboree-gate.”

Personally, I would've called it “Motor-gate” or “Moto-jambo-gate,” because either of those has a better ring to it, but then of course I'd be too lazy to write the actual article—which is why my sister is a reporter and not me. Basically, the gist was that the city council, a scandalous nest of weasels if there ever was one, was in danger of completely destroying the upcoming fourth annual Antello International Motorcycle Jamboree yet again.

To begin with, they'd botched the vendor licensing contract to the point that the state sent in an auditor. Also, they'd scheduled it on the same weekend as Lovelock's own
tenth
annual Harley Fest, so now there was direct competition. Finally, the cleaning and sanitation committee had awarded not one but two no-bid contracts to the mayor's brother-in-law. OTOH, there was going to be a Battle of the Bands. Dad's band, the JC Wonder Excursion, was already signed up to play. I read all about it in the article Evie wrote.