“Not again,” Hand said.
“I’m not, fucker.”
“Don’twiththenewguyinthecar.”
“I’m not.”
Taavi said nothing.
The road bled into Pärnu, a small city of red squat brick buildings, and in its center the spires of a squat burgundy municipal building. This was where he was getting off, Taavi said.
“Here, stop please,” he said. We stopped at a gas station. Hand gave him his address, and Taavi said he’d send Hand a tape, and we all said goodbye. Taavi got out and walked briskly across the parking lot, heading to the bus stop across the street. I pulled all the German marks out of my sock and gave them to Hand.
“Good,” said Hand. “I was hoping you’d do that.”
He ran after Taavi.
He caught up with him in the road and handed him the bills, about $850. “For the band,” he said, “but not for vodka!” Taavi laughed and thanked him and jogged across the street. Hand walked back and closed the door and turned up the heat.
“That was good,” said Hand.
I pulled out of the lot. We passed him, as he waited at the bus stop, but didn’t want him to see us anymore, so we didn’t wave.
“You still want to?” Hand asked.
I did.
At this point, the kids were definitely out of school. It was almost four and in the fading light—just a drop of yellow in a shallow pool of white—we saw them everywhere, the small people. Hand was driving now, and we passed the residential area off the main road, between the railroad tracks and the ocean. We knew where the kids were; now we had to bury the treasure.
We had at best an hour of daylight. We left town and after a few miles pulled off at some sort of forest preserve. We drove down a winding road, then over a set of train tracks, and immediately hit a three-pronged fork in the road. Hand stopped the car.
“This is as good as anyplace.”
I agreed.
We got out and surveyed. I found a crooked tree about fifty feet from the base of the fork. Behind it there was already a kind of hole—home for chipmunks or snakes. It would do. I took a roll of bills from my left sock. With his feet Hand started gauging the distance from the fork to the tree, heel to toe, slowly, as if measuring a room. He was counting, concentrating, so I got a funny idea. Something funny I would say.
“Four six twelve ten one two six—”
This was good.
“Stop it, fucker.”
“Nine eighty twelve four.”
So good.
“Did that work?”
“Yeah, stupid.”
“Whoa.”
“What?”
“Whoa did I just pull some psy ops on you!”
He started over and when he finished it was twenty-three steps. He stood at the hole. The forest was soundless and still.
“What are you putting the treasure in?” he asked, without looking up.
“I don’t know. Do we have a treasure chest?”
“No. But we do need something. You still have that thing you bought in Morocco?”
“The bracelet-vessel thing?”
“Yeah.”
“No, that’s for my mom. We can’t use it,” I said, knowing we would.
The forest was quiet.
I clawed through my backpack and found it. We stuffed the money into the case, silver and crude, bejeweled with colored glass. The bills didn’t fit. I removed half the bills and folded those remaining, twice, and squeezed them in, their bulk straining under the lid. Inside was about 2,000 kroon, though we wanted it to be more. We were having an increasingly hard time getting rid of this goddamn money.
Hand dug behind the tree. “We bury it a foot or so down, then stick a knife from where it’s buried.”
“What knife?”
“The one you bought in Marrakesh.”
“No way. I was giving that to Mo and Thor.”
“We need it. It won’t look right without the knife.”
I had to agree that it would look cooler with the knife handle sticking out. I retrieved the knife and he stabbed it, blade-down, into the dirt, just above the treasure. It looked good, that knife, cheap but elaborately engraved, in this frozen Estonian forest, so quiet.
“What’s the story we tell on the map?” Hand asked.
“What?”
“We need a story. To explain why it’s here. Like, some Moroccan sailors were on the run from thieves and decided Pärnu was the safest place to hide their treasure.”
After he said it, Hand decided that sounded just about right. “Yeah, that’s the story,” he said. I liked it, too. I would have loved it when I was nine. This would have sent my childhood in an entirely different direction. Real buried treasure. Even if the kid didn’t believe in the Moroccan part, still it would be so expanding, would open their minds to such possibilities—this act alone could keep a child—and his or her friends, and theirs—from the grey low-slung sky of adolescence; whenever they would feel that they’d seen everything, or, conversely, that the extraordinary was not possible—and how funny that those two things, diametrically opposed, are always both found in the jaded brain—whenever that happened they’d remember the treasure, the Moroccans on the run, the fact that they’d found the money here, in this ragged forest by the tracks on the edge of their tiny town—
I wanted this so badly when I was young. With this my ceiling would have been higher.
I covered the knife with a long light branch covered in needles. Then, around the tree, we laid three long branches, in a loose triangle in a way, one that would be noticed by the eventual map-bearer but not the average passerby. On cue, a couple in jogging suits ran past, quickly glancing our way. Hand pretended to be examining some flora. I waved.
In the car, with the heat on, we drew the map. I wanted it to look weathered and authentically Moroccan, but feared that the ball-point pen betrayed its youth. I wanted it to be mysterious, with a cryptic and ancient aura, without implying the occult.
“Then why are you drawing the shiv?” Hand asked.
“Is that scary?”
“Of course it’s scary.”
“Too late now.”
“At least make the knife shiny. Shiny knives are less scary.”
I made the shiv shiny. Hand did the Moroccan-style writing—though Hand is not such a skilled speller—and made up the rules.
“Turn up the heat,” Hand said. It was getting even colder. “Do you think the graph paper blows the mood?”
“It’s the only paper we have,” I said.
“What if we burn the edges?”
“No. Come on. That’s so corny.”
“It’ll work,” Hand said. “They’ll believe it. We have to.”
“I refuse.”
“What kind of treasure map is drawn on neat graph paper with the spiral holes all frayed like that? It’ll look like some idiot did it.”
“You have matches?”
“In the first-aid kit,” he said, lunging into the backseat for his backpack. He found the matches. I wanted to do the edge-burning myself.
“Give me those,” I said. I got out and lit a match and set it upon the paper. It burned its liquid flame into the paper and I blew it out. My hands were so cold they were almost useless. I touched the flame to another part of the page, and extinguished it again. It did look better. I had one match left and applied it to the right edge of the map, here, and there, and there. I blew out all three small fires and then tried to blow out the match. I couldn’t. I couldn’t find the wind. My mouth opened but there was no wind. My head was light. I dropped the match. The upper half of my vision started darkening. I opened the door and sat inside.
“Close the door!” Hand said. “It’s freezing.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel my hands. There was a vibration all the way through me, like my whole body was asleep, like a foot would be asleep. It shook my ribs and tickled them. It seemed to move my organs, switching their places, removing them, leaving cold
cavities, then replacing them.
The air was so clear! Our breath so clear!
“Close it!” he yelled.
I found my hands again. I closed the door.
“Nice,” he said, holding the map. “It looks much better.”
I regained my vision and blinked slowly. Jesus.
“Freak,” he said.
The map appears on the following page. You see how I made the knife shiny? I think it worked.
Hand turned the car around and we headed back into town. We had to find a boy or girl, alone, walking home, and then put the map, in a bottle, in their path. This seemed fine in theory but was instantly impossible to carry out. The streets were too crowded, and besides, if we chose one kid, he’d see us place the bottle in their path, ruining the mystery of its origin.
“We’ll leave it in the bushes then,” Hand said. “Some bushes on a well-traveled path.”
“But what if a parent finds it?”
“Right. Forget it.”
We decided to just give it to a kid. Just get out of the car and give it to him or her. No, a group of kids, so they felt safer—a kid alone would never take a map-holding bottle from a pair of strangers, right? But if the kids told their parents that a pair of Americans had given them this map, the parents, fearing some molestation trap, would definitely forbid their looking for it—
“We should just be straight-up about it.” Hand sighed. “We’ll just find a kid with his dad and give it to them together.”
“No. No way. That isn’t fun at all. What kid wants to look for treasure with his dad? No, no.”
“Okay. I’ve got it. We find a bicycle in front of a house and stick it on the bike. Then we’re sure it reaches the kid, he finds it himself—”
“Good. That’s it.” It was a good idea. And lent more romance to the project. Estonian bicycles! Maybe they were different. The spokes thinner—or curved.
We drove around the residential neighborhood, a mix of solid and ordinary suburban homes—not unlike those in our town, really—and shanties, sheds and empty lots. But after twenty minutes it was just about dark and we hadn’t seen one bike. Hand scoffed.
“These kids don’t ride bikes? What’s wrong with them?”
“It’s winter. It’s too cold.”
“ I rode my bike in the winter.”
“Course you did.”
“I did. I had a fucking paper route!”
The ocean was now visible. Dunes just beyond the last row of houses. We turned the car.
We drove past the last houses and onto a narrow road that wound through tall grasses rising through ice and snow, great hairs from a white cold scalp. Over a small bridge and then almost to the beach and ah!—light! It was much brighter here. The sun was setting, or had recently set—it wasn’t clear because the sky was only grey and pink and the cloud cover obscured the sun, if it was still at all with us. The ceiling was all mother-of-pearl, pink and blue and silver, tidepooling.
I jumped out and crunched through the snow. The wind shredded me. The beach was jagged ice-shards all the way to the water, scores of white dishes dropped and broken, the water frozen in its shallows. Off to the right and toward the shore was a swingset, two tires hanging and entwined. A simple silhouette alone against all the pinks and whites tangled in coarse yarn and smooth ribbons. It began to snow.
I ran back to the car and yelled as I did:
“This is it!
“This is it!
“Bring the bandanna!
“And the tape!”
Hand ducked into the car and came out and closed the door and, tripping over the white crooked ice, so like fragments of Sheetrock, he came to me.
“The swingset?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
We would hide the map inside the tire on the swingset. It would be safe there, and would be discovered in the spring. We ran to it, our feet drawing groans from under sheets of ice. When we reached the swingset its supports were black thick-marker lines. Snow on the tires’ tops and innards.
“We’ll put it on the upper inside of this tire,” I said. “It won’t get snowed on there.”
“How are you putting it together?”
“I’m gonna just put the money in the bandanna, and then tape it—God it’s fucking cold! I can’t feel my fingers already.”
“Hurry!”
I put a roll of Moroccan money inside the blue bandanna and I folded the—
“Don’t fold it,” said Hand. “Roll it.”
“You roll it. My hands are gone.”
—map and he stuck it inside the bandanna.
“What’s the money for?” he asked.
“So they know there’s real money at stake. More where this came from, when they find the treasure—”
“Nice.”
He closed the corners around the money and the scroll and I held it to the inside of the tire as Hand taped it there, looping the tape dispenser around and around. I couldn’t feel my hands. I could feel my left thumb. My thumb was dimly attached. Otherwise, nothing.
“Is it stuck?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“Let’s go.”
Back to the car and the thump-thump of the doors, and the heat on high. Snow covered the windshield in a thin gauzy skin. We hugged ourselves and shivered. Palms covered heaters. Fingers warming quickly, fingers that were brittle with cold now were melting, shrinking, becoming liquid. I thanked my fellow and previous humans for the miracle of heat and I started the car.
We drove in the dark to Latvia, past Häädemeeste, Jaagupi, Treimani, the snow coming at us like ghosts, an army of tiny ghosts with no leader. We debated the likelihood that someone would find the map. That someone would find it before spring. That someone would save the map, would actually obey its commands, would not throw it away.
“The money will prevent them from doing that,” I said.
“Right. The teaser cash was good,” Hand said. “But why did we put Moroccan money in the bandanna but Estonian money in the treasure?”
“Damn.”
“We could go back.”
“No, no. Let’s go. We’re almost at the border.”
At the border town, Ainazi, a checkpoint. Part of me hoped for Soviets and Kalishnikovs. We stopped and Hand rolled down his window. A man in a full puffy snowsuit and a clipboard asked where we were coming from: Tallinn, we said; and where we were headed: Riga, we said. He asked to check the trunk; we complied. He had us get out—the air a cold that scrapes you everywhere, a credit card against an unshaven face—and then sent us to a window in a small building, where behind the window a woman, also in a snowsuit, asked us, in English, for our passports. We provided our passports and noticed she had a box of chocolates on her desk. The snowfall was thinning.
“I have a question,” said Hand.
“Yes,” she said, handing back his passport. It would be weird, I thought, to work at a desk, in a snowsuit. Hand:
“Are you going to offer us some of that chocolate or what?”
“These?” she said, pointing to her chocolates.
Hand rolled his eyes. “Yeah those. Are they all for you?”
She gave him a look, one of exasperation hiding great warmth, that said loudly that if he came back tomorrow they could be together and later married. She didn’t seem to mind our filthy clothes and dirty faces. We’d vowed to get some new clothes, at least pants, in Riga. Our smell was now noticeable.
Smirking, she handed the box through the window. I took a round one. Hand grabbed three.
We said thank you and got back in the car.
“Latvians are great!” he said, pulling through the gate.
“Yeah,” I said. “Latvians are the best!”
Twenty minutes later:
“These people are diseased!”
“They’re fucking wrong.”
“I don’t understand,” Hand said, “what the point is in acting that way.”
“What the fuck
did we do to that guy?” I said. We were back in the car, fuming, after stopping for gas and Pringles about twenty miles after the border. In the dark we’d pulled up to the gas station with a food mart and café attached, and the twelve people in the café inside had stared as if we were driving a hovercraft with bloody bodies strapped to the hood.
When we walked inside, the clerk, a square-shouldered man with a wide jaw squinted at us, but when we returned his stare he looked down. Everyone stared at us. Angrily, with visible suspicion, bald hatred, even menace. When we approached the counter Hand said hi to the burly man, with a little wave. The man did not return the greeting. We paid our money and the man slammed our change on the counter in a way that told us to leave, quickly, that we were not welcome. Now we were driving again through the frozen everything, on a two-lane road cut through a dark forest of straight thick unbending trees.