“Man, you funny. You come out here to sleep.”
“God almighty but I told you. Don’t you ever walk off and leave me that way. I told you we had to stay together.”
“Yeah, okay. But be cool, jes be cool.” Ondray backed up, alarmed by the wild-eyed mudman who wavered toward him. “I found some good stuff back in them reeds.”
He held up his collecting jar; it was filled with clear jelly speckled black.
“What the hell?”
“Frog eggs.”
“You little bastard.”
“Good stuff. These don’t die on the way, I be farmin’ frogs.”
Karl recovered with an ice pack and some afternoon teevee. His favorite show came on at three, I Married Joan (“What a girl, what a whirl, what a life!”) with Joan Davis and Jim Backus as Brad.
Joan Davis was no stunner. She had a big nose, almost no chin and a rubbery face that could have been a man’s. But there was something about her that brought the heat to Karl’s balls. He would picture her sprawled across a bed, skirt up around her waist. Conical tits, legs and arms so thin, so helpless. He imagined himself pushing them here and there like a doll’s, grasping that helmet of glossy blond hair and pulling her face close to his. He lay back on the sofa and masturbated, thinking of Joan Davis, of Tildy, of a little girl who let him pee into her hands in third grade; and at the end, as usual, he thought of Jerry Apache’s wife in the emergency room, her dirty sandals and red toenails, her face distorted with grief, tears and mucus running, her knees buckling as she slid down the white tiled wall and fell in a heap on the floor.
He ejected his semen onto a torn magazine. Just as quickly he began to recede. That moment’s appeasement faded into the slack afternoon; his nerves twitched, frantic for something more, and went numb. A droplet fell from his deflated penis, cold and gray on the edge of his thigh.
He reached behind him for distraction, pulling old issues of Rockhound, Prospector’s World, and True Treasure Tales from the tumbling pile in the corner. He knew parts of them by heart, favorite passages he would reread at times of dejection like verses from the Bible. Ah yes, here was the one about the man who discovered a 28-carat diamond while pitching horseshoes with his nephew. There was inspiration in these yellowed pages. All things were possible. One revelatory moment, a fast dig in the right piece of ground, was all it took to turn your life around. Rebirth. Rebirth as a man of means.
Opening a three-year-old copy of True Treasure Tales, Karl looked at the pictures and read the advertisements. Then he found an article in the back which, after hurrying through the first few paragraphs, he could not remember having ever seen before. It was written by someone called J. Frank Robey (Former NYPD Consultant). The title was “Jazzman’s Fortune.”
… The diminutive, hunchbacked Webb overcame his handicaps and went on to become one of the premier jazz drummers of his era. Connoisseurs of Negro music still speak in tones of awe about the great bands he led in the 20’s and 30’s at the Savoy Ballroom in New York’s Harlem. Many famous musicians graduated from Webb’s band and made names for themselves elsewhere. Included among these would be Ella Fitzgerald, the great vocalist who’s still making records today and who, as a shy orphan from Baltimore, debuted with Webb’s band in the early 30’s.
Unlike many jazzmen of the time who squandered their money on cars, clothes, liquor, and fast women, Chick Webb was a shrewd businessman who made sound investments and managed them carefully. So it was that shortly after his death, the Harlem rumor mill was alive with stories of a fortune in cash and jewels secreted somewhere in Webb’s sumptuous townhouse. Mounted police were called in on several occasions to control wild mobs trying to break into the property. Over the next few years amateur treasure hunters, as well as some out-and-out criminals, tore the place apart, but nothing of significance was ever found.
The end of the story? Maybe not. Says one-time nightclub owner Dixie Diggs, “Chick sank a lot of money into real estate. He was ahead of his time. He had buildings all over Harlem. Sugar Hill, Morningside Heights. There could be a floor safe or a secret room in one of those places that nobody’s stumbled on yet.”
But what are the chances that the treasure ever really existed? Is it only a myth? A relic of that tumultuous period in our history when the nation’s heart beat in Swing time and men and women danced all night to forget their worries? Dixie Diggs thinks not.
“Chick was always pretty tight with a dollar. It would have been just like him to stash his dough where no one could find it.”
Naturally, Webb’s real estate holdings have long since passed into other hands and tracing them would be a difficult task. But then, who ever said treasure hunting was easy! Maybe that floor safe or secret room is still waiting to be discovered. With some careful research and a little luck, the jazzman’s fortune may yet be found.
New York. A city that big must be full of hidden treasures, and Tildy, who wouldn’t know where to look, had gone without him. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the New York he knew from the movies — blinding neon, overflowing sidewalks. And thousands upon thousands of buildings. It would take a lifetime to search even half of them. Was it really all in the hunting?
Karl went back to the beginning and tracked the story again. He was so absorbed in this second reading that he barely heard the rapping at the door and the rattle of the knob.
“Yo. Yo in there.”
Karl fastened his pants, peeked through the curtains at a man in a polyester suit who turned to one side as he lit a brown cigarette. He straightened, flicking the dead match away, and Karl saw his tense face, with bits of green toilet paper pasted over shaving cuts. He looked too nervous and shaggy to be much of a threat. Probably had the wrong address anyway. Karl puffed himself up and opened the door.
“Karl Gables,” the man said, reading from a slip of paper.
“You’re lookin’ at him.”
“I’d like to speak with your wife, Karl. Is she around?”
“No sir, she ain’t.”
“That is her car parked over there, license number 5Y 213?”
“But she ain’t in it.”
The man smiled abruptly and one of the paper bits dropped off his chin. “What it is, I’m a friend of Tildy’s. I’m associated with her employer, the Seminole Star Corporation of Jacksonville. I’d like to come in and ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. Get a few things cleared up.”
Karl looked at the heavy gold chain around his neck and the grime on his shirt cuffs. “You got a business card or something?”
“Gee, you know I’m fresh out. But I really am a good friend of your wife’s. I know her well enough to tell you she likes mustard on a baked potato.”
“Yeah, okay. That’s good enough,” Karl said, stepping back.
“Fine. Great. Just a few minutes’ conversation, I mean I’m not going to screw up your day, Karl. And I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a bottle of six-year-old bourbon in my car. Good thing to carry when you spend as much time in motels as I do, know what I mean? We’ll have a couple of nips and I’m sure the time will pass quite pleasantly for both of us, okay?”
“Yeah, why not. I’ll get some glasses.”
The visitor was back a minute later with the bottle. He shopped the chairs in the room, chose one, and filled Karl’s glass. “Actually, I think I’ll hold off a couple minutes till I get my breath back. Been humping all around trying to find this place.”
“We like it out here.” Karl sucked bourbon fumes through his nose, upended the glass. “Real mellow. You carry good whiskey…. Say, I don’t even know your name.”