Chapter Seven
“What book?” asked Willy. Now he figured they were finally getting to the story of that mine Juan had dropped hints about months earlier.
Juan paused for a moment and then whispered: “A little blue book my mom has. In it are the clues to find The Mine of the Babbling Padre.”
“The Mine of the Babbling Padre?” Willy wondered later why he hadn’t become suspicious of the ridiculous name. Of course, Willy had gotten interested in the Santa Claus Mine before and that had been a pretty dumb name. Later, Willy sure wished that he had never heard of the Babbling Padre or that business hadn’t picked up at Bess Tacos and made it profitable so Jipson rode their asses non-stop, because they never would have thought of mining again—probably.
“My mother has the book,” said Juan, going on with his story of the mine, “It tells the words of a padre who had once known another old padre who had lived out at an abandoned mission. These are the last word of the padre which were written down by an old lady in Mammoth. My mom got the book from her mother who was a good friend with this lady.”
“Words about a mine?” asked Willy.
“That’s what they are, Wilhelmo, my bruder, dog. Words about the most fabulous mine you ever knew about. The place is rich with gold, from two hundred years ago, and it’s never been touched. And there’s more. Nuggets in the roots of trees, man. But there’s a big fuckin’ problem.”
“What’s that?”
“My mother still has the book on a shelf in her bedroom. I saw it in the summer. It’s blue with little black letters, and the paper is stuffed in that book somewhere, but she won’t give it over to me. Changos! She never leaves me alone in the house to search for it. I need time to find it.”
“How do you know she won’t give it to you?”
“I already asked about it two weeks ago. She said ‘You will only get trouble at that mine.’ But I think she really wanted to give the book to my oldest brother, but he has no interest in anything but this chica he’s after who sings cowboy music and I know he is never going to look for that mine.”
“So the mine is just going to waste?” Willy suggested, trying not to sound too pushy.
“Sure.”
“And so we could probably get the book and make sure that mine don’t go to waste no more?”
“We could. Maybe. All we gots to do is get into her bedroom and search around in her bookshelves and it’s ours, man.”
“That sounds pretty easy,” Willy said.
“Simple enough for us.”
About a week later, Jipson had hired two extra kitchen workers because of all the extra hours he needed, Christmas coming and such, and Juan and Willy got a new schedule with two nights and three days off per week. Juan borrowed a car and the first afternoon they had off, they drove to his mother’s house, which was a little brick place painted yellow with pillars and iron work in front. Every pillar had a different animal on it and it was near the banks of the dry Santa Cruz River.
“Madrecita,” said Juan when they came in.
“Mijo,” said Juan’s mother, kissing him on a cheek, “Oye, you boys are looking rough about the edges,” she said when she stepped back from them. “Get yourselves something from del refri. There’s soup and some good puddings I bought. Carmel flavor with swirly stuff.”
“Okay,” said Juan.
“Damn, both of you look like hell,” she said.
“I think maybe I’m coming down with something," said Juan.
Willy grinned. Willy considered Juan a hypochondriac.
“Check the medicine cabinet, mijo,” his mother ordered.
“Thanks, I will. We got a lot of things on our minds,” said Juan kind of casually. “And Jipson is making us work so many hours. But he hired some more help, so we get a break.”
“Well, don’t you go getting yourselves fired again, huh? And could you stay and watch the Tito’s baby tonight for me? I want to play bingo at the casino. They’re making a big jackpot for the holiday.” By this she meant Thanksgiving which had been on Thursday and this was the Saturday after.
This was a shocking development of good luck and exactly what they had wanted—to be left in her house, but the idea of them keeping a six-month-old by themselves was ridiculous.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Juan, not thinking fast enough of a diplomatic way to say that he and Willy couldn’t take care of no babies on their own.
“Okay, but don’t ask for no favors from your sister or me,” his mother said sharply. She started pulling dishes out of the refrigerator and shoving them on the table. “Here, take some of this,” she said, as though she really didn’t care if they did or didn’t.
“No, we don’t mean we’re not going to baby-sit,” Willy explained. “What we mean is could we baby-sit an older one?” He fumbled, trying to be the friend who helps keep peace between the mother and the friend. Willy had lived with his older brother so long he had forgotten how to be with a mother. And he sure hoped his own mother was happy in Hawaii with that guy she’d met at the bowling alley.
“What do you mean? You want to pick the kid you get to baby-sit?” said Juan’s mother, a little angry at his rudeness.
“No, Mom,” said Juan, whose temper was rising at them always being taken wrong by his mother, “we mean could we have an older one with us who could tell us what to do and how to take care of the baby?”
“Oh. You want a kid with you that could tell you how to take care of the other kid?” said Juan’s mother.
“Exactly,” said Juan in relief.
“I guess your cousin Ella could probably spare her Beto. He’s pretty annoy—he knows a lot.”
“Okay, I know him. How old is he now?” Willy asked Juan’s mother very politely.
“He’s six. That should be plenty old enough to help you two out. Be here at seven because we’re leaving for the casino promptly at seven-fifteen. I feel real lucky tonight with it being Thanksgiving and I want to get there earlier than usual.”
They went back to Willy’s house and discussed strategy. Juan said they better be watching that Beto who was a real mouthy chingadera and they had better be very careful around him. He wished they had another six year old besides Beto, but they would just have to tire him out. If they didn’t get the book and he saw them trying, he’d blab to Juan’s mom for sure and she would put the book away somewhere or give it to another relative for safe keeping. She wasn’t going to let them go mining again.
They showed up at her house again at seven, but they had spent the afternoon discussing strategy. They planned ways to get this Beto tired and get him in bed by eight-thirty, however it turned out Beto was more than they bargained for.
“Do you know about baby diapers and wipes?” asked a suspicious Beto when Juan’s mother had driven off and they had to change Ella’s kid right away. They had stripped the diaper off on the carpet.
“Fuchi! Que mal huele!” cried Juan.
“You are doing it wrong. Don’t you know nothing,” said Beto.
“Callate, guey. Sure we do,” said Juan. “What are we doing wrong?”
“You don’t pick him up like that. You do it like this. And, you wait! You also need the changing mat to put under him. It’s yellow and rubbery. If you put his butt down on the rug you’ll get poop on my Nana’s rug. And that’s an especial expensive pile she picked out especial at Carpet Giant.”
Beto ran across the rug and then at the tiled hall he knocked on his shoes and wheels came out of his soles and he skated to the back where they kept the diapers and the changing mat. How were they going to get a kid tired when he had wheels on his shoes?
“I’ll special pile his ass,” said Juan when Beto disappeared. “I knew he was a chingadera, but I don’t remember this kid being so damn smart. Maybe I haven’t seen him in a while.” Meanwhile, the little baby was bare with his legs up in the air and Juan holding his ankles up. The baby looked scared about what they were doing to him. He clamped his bottom tightly together.
“How do we wipe your ass? like this, man?” Juan asked the baby, holding it at arm’s length and wiping kind of quickly and sloppily around its butt.
“You scared the Tito’s kid,” said Beto looking at the baby’s big eyes when he came back with the mat. “I didn’t think anybody could do that.” It was difficult to tell if this was a complaint or a compliment, but he was more suspicious of them than before.
After they put the baby to bed, with Beto’s help, they tried everything to get Beto worn out. They tried to make him take those shoes with wheels off, but he refused. Finally, around ten, he fell asleep on the couch watching a DVD called Los Cucillos en El Agua Vampira which they had brought over.
“Mierda, I hope they are winning at bingo!” exclaimed Juan as they headed for his mother’s bedroom. “We need time to go through all my mom’s books!”
Juan’s mother’s room was dark and far at the back of the house. When they found the room, they groped their way around her bed and to the built-in bookshelves that surrounded a window that looked out on a creepy old cactus garden. Juan switched on a little flowery lamp, which was on a bedside table. Willy kept thinking there was someone out there watching them, maybe vampires with knives, and Willy wanted Juan to use a flashlight they had left in the car, but Juan said going outside to the car would waste time and the sound of the front door opening might wake up Beto.
Juan and Willy started going through the shelves, but it was hard because Juan’s mother had about fifty billion little books and a lot of them were blue, the color of the book with the paper about the mine. They kept pulling more and more books out and Willy had to have Juan check all the ones he found because he had no idea what it looked like.
“Remember,” said Juan, “Everything has got to go back in the same spot where you took it in case we don’t find the book tonight. My mom should not know we been searching in here if we don’t find it or she might take it away.”
“Okay,” Willy agreed.
Willy pulled out scores of books, but none of them were the one with the Babbling Padre story.
“That’s it!” exclaimed Juan when Willy called Juan’s attention to two blue ones at the end of a shelf. “That little blue book with the marks on it.”
“It looks like someone scribbled crayon on it,” Willy said.
“That’s the book. I did that when I was little.”
Willy gingerly handed it over to his friend Juan.
“In the back of this book are the papers. Very old.” He cracked the book open and broke its back. Pieces of the cover like big dandruff patches fell on his pants. At the back, there was nothing. “Oh,” he said, disappointed.
“What? There’s no paper?” Willy asked.
“Maybe at the front,” said Juan.
He flipped forward in the book and frowned when nothing, no paper, old or new, appeared. Then a slip of paper fell on his lap from the center of the book.
“Chin! Ah, here. This is it, el document.” He carefully opened the old sheet of typewritten paper that had yellow stains on the folds.
“What does it say?” Willy asked eagerly. Willy tried to get closer and accidentally kicked over a tin wastepaper can. The can made a lot of noise when his foot hit it. He tried to set it back up quietly and made more noise.
“Oye, get out of my Nana’s stuff,” said a voice from the doorway. That was one of the scariest noises Willy had ever heard. Los Cucillos en El Agua Vampira must have gotten to him or else the creepy moonlight on the cactuses outside Mrs. Verdugo’s bedroom had upset him.
Juan and Willy jumped at the sound and turned around to see that damn Beto in his pajamas watching them. Juan slipped the old paper they had found in the book up under his shirt to hide it from Beto.
“What do you want in Nana’s books? You can’t read. Get out of her room.”
“Of course we can read,” said Juan.
“I bet I can read better than you,” said Beto.
“Callate, guey! We ain’t getting into it with you, little man, now go away,” said Juan angrily. He stood up.
“Not until you leave my Nana’s things alone.”
“Listen, I know your Nana. She can protect her own stuff. We ain’t hurting her stuff. We are just looking for something to read while you sleep. Would she let us in her house alone if she thought we were going to hurt her stuff?” asked Juan.
“She probably don’t know what you’re up to,” said Beto, sensibly, “She thought you was taking care of the Tito’s kid. She didn’t know you wanted to knock over stuff in her bedroom and smash it.”
Juan and Willy sort of stood there dumbfounded by the kid’s accusing tone of voice and the way he stood his ground.
“We shoulda waited longer to search,” whispered Willy.
“We couldn’t wait this kid out! He’s too smart for us!” Juan whispered back. “He is always a dirty little tough chingadera. I remember him now.”
Juan stood there looking at Beto and Willy tried to look at him like he was meaning business, too. He tried to shoot steely glares at him.
“Go to bed,” ordered Juan.
“Get outta my Nana’s room!”
Well, it went on that way, back and forth for a while between the uncle and his nephew. That little kid Beto was pretty bossy, but Juan could be a lot bossier. Juan forced him back to the couch eventually, after he skated on those wheels and yelled about his Nana and how she would get them. They finally resorted to putting the vampire movie back on the TV, and sat in the front room with him, sternly, but it was hard to get him back to sleep after he had seen them searching through his Nana’s bookshelf. At about eleven-thirty he finally drifted off, though he was still saying he would tell his Nana everything he’d seen in the morning, which really didn’t matter now that they had the paper which hopefully had directions to their mine.
"Fiou!" said Juan when Beto finally fell asleep.
When Juan’s mother returned they acted like nothing had happened and left for Juan’s apartment with the paper. Juan rented a small one bedroom apartment in a brown stucco building that was long like a barn and had barren dirt and chicken wire surrounding it. Cars parked right in front of the apartment doors like it was a motel.
Juan was so excited when we got to his place that he could barely get his keys in the lock. “I will translate it for you,” said Juan after he had read it twice by the light in his kitchen. “First pour me some coffee.”
When the boiling hot black coffee was on the table in front of him, he started reading the paper to Willy. “‘I am the sole witness of the words of the Babbling Padre. In his fever he said ‘great fortune of gold hidden in the lost canyon which was once the property of the old priest, the old padre, a friend of our family. God save his soul. And this mine is for the taking. The nuggets are large and lying loosely in amongst the placers. If only someone should be able to go there again and bring them back to El Town.’”
“That’ll be us!” said Willy.
“It’s going to be us.’You shall proceed,’” read Juan and he paused, “This is the direction part.”
“Okay.”
“‘South and east to the mountains that are known as the Massacre Mountains and then in the Depredation Gulch fourteen miles. You will see the rock in the form of a potato and you will find this rock in the Massacre Mountains. The Massacre Mountains is where you will find it. You will look for the potato rock. At the back of the potato there is the vein of silver placer and gold. And the vein of gold is behind the potato rock.’”
“He is really repeating himself there,” Willy pointed out.
“Bueno, I told you he was called the babbling padre.” Juan drank some more coffee and read again. “‘In the Massacre Mountains, the Depredation Gulch, find the potato rock.’ And the paper says he died right after.”
“Is there such a range? Are there Massacre Mountains? And a Depredation Gulch?” Willy asked. He couldn’t hide the excitement he felt.
“That’s what’s so great,
man. There are. I found them once on a map! And we could go there.”
“Hell! Let’s go there right away!”
“Now that we have the book, we need to get a truck,” said Juan. “Something that can go off-roading.” He was always practical and thinking ahead.
“I know where one is,” Willy said. “An old Hudson. It would take us there, wouldn’t it?”
“That old Hudson of your landlady’s that you told me about?”
“Yeah. If we took it she would never know the difference. She only looks at it once a month when her nephew comes over and starts it.”
“No. An old Hudson would not be any good anyway.” Juan tugged his goatee. “We are going to need equipment, Wilhelmo. A Hudson would not hold the mining equipment and our supplies. It’s pretty cold, too. We have to make a good camp out there. Well, maybe I know of another truck. I’m not sure.”
This truck Juanie thought they could get was a Bronco Two that belonged to another cousin of Juan’s who was willing to give them the pink slip for nothing if they would get it outta his backyard cause it was full of all these wild cats and his wife was pissed about it. Man, they were so happy when they went by his house the next day and Juan’s cousin said they were getting it for sure. For days afterward they kept asking Sonia to drive them by just to take a look at it sitting in the yard with cats hopping in and out of all the windows. The only thing wrong with it was that it had a busted tranny, but they were certain they could find a rebuilt one and drop it in pretty easy, but it turned out that was a fantasy born of their own ignorance. They rushed off to the parts houses all over town, but it turned out the parts had dried up on those old things years ago and you could not get a tranny at any price even in the junkyards.
Then Juan remembered another truck he knew of, but his memory was hazy about where that other, better truck was.
Juan first could not remember which cousin had this other old truck and what shape it was in. Since he wasn’t sure, they wasted a lot of weekends during Christmas driving around in Willy’s sister’s car, driving around the streets of town to the different cousins’ backyards and asking aunts where the cousins lived. At every aunt’s house they had to stop and visit and that was real painful for both of them, except for some of the food, which was pretty good, but the conversation sucked. Driving up and down these alleys they would set all sorts of dogs barking at them and people would come out and look at them. Willy was about to go crazy searching for that thing and when they didn’t even know if it was in any kind of shape to take off-roading. Willy couldn’t help wishing Juan would have just called his cousins on the phone rather than making them drive by their houses, but he said it was easier to look ourselves for the truck because he would know the truck when he saw it, but if he started asking people he would just get confused about which truck they had in their backyard.
One of those days when Juan drove them down the alley behind his girl cousin Yesinia’s little green adobe house which was surrounded by mesquite trees and was on a quiet little street up near the Rillito River. You could see the whole Santa Catalina Mountains laid out to the north of that house and they looked purple and dark blue with powdered frosting sifted all over the top and down in the canyons because it had snowed a few days before up there and it looked beautiful from the river. It was views like that that made Willy know why his great granddaddy came out to Arizona.
It turned out Juan didn’t know it, but Yesinia was seeing a guy named B. Body O’Reilly who had a strange name and a stranger personality including wanting to murder Juan and Willy on sight with the ax he was using to chop at a big safe which was lying in the middle of his backyard along with a bunch of rusty weightlifting equipment and boxed cactuses. Willy saw him chopping at the safe through a gap in a half-dead oleander hedge when they parked in the alley. A dog somewhere starting growling and Willy was getting very scared about the whole situation that Juan was leading him into.
“Why does that man have an ax?” Willy asked Juan as they approached the back of the house.
“Huh?” said Juan, looking around for the truck, Willy guessed. Juan’s head was bobbing up and down, craning over walls.
“Are we going into the yard with the man with the ax?” Willy asked, pointing at B. Body who was in a chopping position over the safe.
“Huh? I gotta see my cousin. Don’t ask me about no man with an ax,” said Juan, ignoring Willy’s concern.
“Is that your cousin? Are we at your cousin’s house?”
“Yesinia should be here somewheres. Changos!”
Juan kept looking every which way but at the man who was chopping the safe!
Willy couldn’t tell if they were headed into the yard with the safe, but he certainly hoped they were not.
“He is really going at that safe,” Willy said nervously when they got a little closer. “I hope he don’t see us, mierda!”