Reluctant for me to go, Paco delayed my departure, saying that his father wanted to give me a ceremony of farewell, a despedida. This was a whole evening of eating, toasting each other with gulps of mezcal, and grateful speeches. The old man, Don Carlos, had not said much in the week I stayed in their walled compound, but often I saw him eyeing me and nodding, and he touched my shoulder in a fatherly way, murmuring his thanks for having saved him.
“Padrino,” he said and put his hand on his heart.
“Godfather,” Paco said. “Your compadre—your compa.”
I took it to mean he would be my benefactor, and I thanked him, lifting my shirt, to show him the pistol in its holster on my belt.
On this last night after the despedida, Don Carlos took a small pouch from his pocket and presented it to me. He urged me to open it. In the pouch was a gold nugget the size of a kidney bean but as rough as a fragment of gravel.
“Un imán,” he said and queried his son with a frown.
“A magnet,” Paco said. “It will attract more gold for you. Keep it for luck.”
I thanked him and said, “I’m leaving tomorrow very early—don’t get up. I’ll be as quiet as I can.”
“We’ll see you off,” Paco said. And then Don Carlos motioned for me to listen. He spoke in Spanish, Paco translating.
“My father wants to tell you something important, and he doesn’t trust his English,” Paco said, as the old man muttered. “He is grateful that you saved his life—and I am grateful, too, my friend. But you need to know that he was not stranded there in the desert because of disgrace. He was left to die because of his trust. It was his brother, Ramón, who abandoned him there. Ramón is in the same business as us, and we felt there was enough supply and enough outlets for both Ramón’s people and us. But Ramón didn’t see it that way. He wanted to frighten his brother—Ramón is older and greedier and ungrateful. If it were not for you, my father would have died.”
Paco stopped talking, the old man was sighing. Finally the old man stood before me and raised a warning finger.
“He is reciting a proverb,” Paco said. “A Mexican saying, Confiá en tu amigo como harías con tu peor enemigo.”
I shrugged, appealing to him to translate.
“We say, ‘Trust your best friend as you would your worst enemy.’ But my father says, ‘Trust your brother as you would your worst enemy.’”
Then Don Carlos spoke to him, as though reminding him of something he’d forgotten.
“Yes,” Paco said. “We want to thank you for something else. All the time you’ve been here you have been polite. You have not asked any questions. We appreciate that. You have earned my father’s trust. But if you need help, know this—you will always be under the protection of la familia Zorrilla.”
He waited a beat when he said it, as though to gauge whether I would recognize it, and smiled when I didn’t react. How they made a living, how they found the money to build this hacienda, how he’d come to be betrayed and robbed in the desert by his brother, he did not say; but both father and son were grateful that I hadn’t asked.
Paco put his finger to his lips. “Our secret, hermano.”
“Un fuerte abrazo,” the old man said, raising his arms.
They took turns hugging me, and the next morning at six the whole household was up, my breakfast of eggs and beans and ham on the table, a basket of food for me to take on my trip, and after I finished, more hugs, more protestations of gratitude.
It was only when I left, steering my van through the gated archway in the perimeter wall, that I realized that for eight days I had not been outside the perimeter wall. The wall was ten feet high, its top trimmed with spikes, the gate of heavy wood planks sliding on a rail that shut with a thud as soon as I passed through—a fortified compound.
Following Gustavo’s advice and using his notations on the topographical map in the Arizona Atlas he’d given me, I returned to the Quartzsite area, but this time down a narrow track to the Plomosa Mountains, a spot he’d circled with his pen, Ghost Gulch, beneath an immensity of cracked and steep-sided rock, shown on the map as Black Mesa, an arrow to the southwest, Castle Dome Peak, his scribble in the margin of the map, Oro.
Gold had recently been found in the vicinity, he’d said, and that’s why prospectors had begun to gather there—I saw tire tracks and diggings of previous searchers. But he emphasized that this was the gateway to the gold fields, that I would need to go farther. In the summer floods and freshets the gold flakes and nuggets migrated deeper into the canyons and down the washes. I’d need to ride my dirt bike five miles into the narrowness of Ghost Gulch, and perhaps continue on foot another mile along the creek bed of tumbled boulders, climbing the cliffs and traversing to where the seasonal water deposited the scraps of gold.
I knew this process in theory from my geology studies in a classroom; Gustavo knew it as a tough man in boots, hiking the hills, crossing this rocky desert from Mexico, observing the movements of prospectors, hearing their whispers.
“Don’t hurry,” he’d said through Paco. “Don’t let anyone see you. Don’t run out of water.”
It took me a week to pick my way through the gulch and its rocky obstacles, camping on the way in the fissures of its cliffs, to reach the sprawl of rough stones and the heaped ribs of gravel the sudden summer floods had left here—familiar water-shaped forms in a place where there was now no water, an arid inland sea in which I was drifting in the heat.
At my last camp I calculated how much water I’d need to last me until I was able to walk back to where I’d left my dirt bike and resupply myself from my van. Four days, I figured—not much. But I’d work in relays, keeping this spot as my permanent camp and fetching water whenever I needed it.
At first, weary in the September heat, I saw nothing but broken rock. And then, in the stillness, as my eyes became accustomed to the glare and the black shadows in the contours of the gulch, and the desert beyond it, I saw a ground squirrel, flicking its tail, querying my presence there. And in time other creatures—mice, kangaroo rats, lizards and snakes, and one day, slashed by a blade of sunshine, a fox. They were my inspiration: if I was careful and vigilant and kept close to the ground, I could thrive in the shadows here like them. I regarded them as my companions.
Out of touch, on my own, surrounded by fractured rock, and scrub and sand, in a valley as hot and bleak as a crucible, I began to understand who I was and what I wanted. No one interrupted me or asked me questions. I lived without pretension. I was an animal in a purified state of utter solitude. Even if I found no gold I would have the satisfaction that I’d found contentment. There was no shadow of Frank here—he was far away and very small.
The purification was not an illusion. This desert had no smell, it was scorched and simplified. I had the sense that it had been cleansed by the heat and light. So my food tasted better, my senses were sharpened, I felt more alive, and along with those many small creatures—the mice, the lizards, the snakes—I was one large creature moving slowly among the boulders, clawing in the gravel for gold—placer gold—in the old streambeds.
My equipment was primitive but efficient—a dry washer for sifting gravel, and a basic panning kit—pan, rock hammer, hand shovel, whisk broom, tweezers, sniffer bottle. There wasn’t enough water available for proper panning, so I concentrated on my dry washer, screening dust and pebbles by gravity separation, looking for gold flakes or nuggets in the hopper.
What mattered most was that I was fully occupied, wholly engaged in my progress through the ravines. I may have called it a search for gold, but that was a pretext for learning how to live as a desert solitaire.
I knew the scientific name for every rock and blade of stone, but living among them, sitting on them, cracking them with my hammer, the names were flat and featureless and robbed my rocky habitat of meaning. I gloried in the colors and shapes, in the sky the plumes of cloud wisp shadowing and tinting the galleries. The rocks were tightly folded and heterogenous. My studies did not help by reminding me they were quartzofeldspathic.
The gneiss and schist glittering before me were hosts of gold. Not much of it maybe, “low tonnage,” a serious extractive company might say, but high grade and enough for me. I saw pyrite, and on the surface of the pseudomorph, blebs of metallic gold in the small cavities in its surface we called vugs. In the old dry streambeds I found gold-bearing gravel, gold particles that had been liberated from the pyrite during oxidation: gold from the veins of the pyrite—epithermal veins. Hacking with my hammer I found grains and inclusions of gold in their chunks of galena. The placer deposits were full of gold-rich galena—brittle and blocky and crystalline.
My studies had specific names for what I saw—silicic rocks, basalt, andesite, rhyolite. And sandstone, limestone, and shale in the sedimentary rock. But I preferred to see them as an aspect of my nesting place—slabs of gray or greenish gray, or limey, or maroon phyllites, as ashflow tuffs or tuffaceous sandstone, fine textured and foliated. And I recognized that from here at Plomosa to Castle Dome I was in the presence of gold, floating because of its high specific gravity—free gold.
How did Gustavo and the Zorrilla family know this was gold country? Obviously they sent their own prospectors out in search of gold, or bought it from freelancers, who eluded the big mining operations in the area and the recognized claims. These men burrowed into the rockfalls and scavenged in the gravel and came away with buckets that were sifted for spoonfuls of gold, the blebs and nuggets and flakes and dust.
Instead of science I saw the subtlety of layered rock faces, the glitter or crystal, some of the stone as vital-seeming as flesh, veined like the back of my hand. The beauty of this desert place—its purple and ochre spires, the grandeur of the setting—was appropriate for gold.
I gathered small quantities and kept on the move, resupplying with trips to my van, and remaining hidden. I found more than I expected, and I seldom went a few days without turning up something lovely, even if it was only a scattering of flakes, patterned like glorious fish scales. I’d pick them up by wetting my fingertip and tapping the flakes into my crucible to heat them into a plump gold bead.
Three months of this, and I thought, I can’t imagine ever growing tired of prospecting. Finding gold was my incentive to continue, and the days when I found nothing were a challenge to go farther and dig deeper. In my ninth week I had penetrated beyond Plomosa to the orangey niches of Castle Dome.
By then I’d traveled so far in the desert I was nearer the direct road to Quartzsite, its provisions and its pay phones. I had called home a few more times, but Mother had deflected my questions. That evasion put me on the alert, since the rarity of a no-news call seemed to me in itself newsworthy.
The next time, when I called from Quartzsite, Mother said, “I think Frank wants a word.”
“Fidge,” he said. “How you doing?” And without waiting for an answer, he went on, “I want to take you to Mexico—Acapulco. You deserve a vacation.”
What I’d been doing I did not regard as work. I thought of it as a quest, every day a new challenge and often the reward of enough dust and flakes to melt into a bead of gold.
But Frank said, “Hey, do yourself a favor,” and he spoke with such urgency I found myself agreeing—yes, I was near Mexico now; yes, I could fly from Phoenix; yes, Acapulco might be fun.
He gave me a date—a week away—and said, “I’ll have a ticket waiting for you.”
When I drove back to my camp, I thought: Maybe a different Frank. And certainly a different me: I have some stories for him.
As usual with Frank, the reality was more complicated than his seemingly straightforward offer of an Acapulco holiday. Frank met my plane and took me to the hotel, where we shared the same room. It became clear that Frank was there as an attendee at an event at this Mexican resort, sponsored by a large law firm that Frank’s Littleford law practice partnered with on the personal injury cases that had become Frank’s specialty.
“So what’s this, a kind of convention?”
“Not for you—you’re here for fun.”
I smiled because generous Frank was such a rarity. But here I was in a fancy hotel by the sea. Then I remembered.
“By the way, how’s Whitney?” I asked, because he hadn’t mentioned her. He first turned away, in profile, losing his smile, showing me the droopy side of his face. Then, as though to confuse me, he looked at me, with his off-center gaze and two distinct expressions, his whole happy-sad face.
“Long story!”
But he said no more. We went to eat at a vast buffet, chafing dishes of fish soup and Mexican stews, platters of crabs’ legs and fat shrimp, bowls of salads and fruit, and all the food I’d dreamed of at my camp. The cold beer itself was a novelty, the fresh bread like a delicacy. After my monastic existence in the desert I was overwhelmed, and with the unlimited mezcal and tequila I was drunk most nights. Unused to such feasting, I exhausted myself and turned in early. I swam in the resort pool in the mornings when Frank was at meetings, and some days I dozed in a hammock at the beach.
I had not thought I needed a vacation, and perhaps I really didn’t, but the routine of the resort, the eating, the drinking, the mariachi music, the marine sunlight, and Frank’s talk of life in Littleford, exhausted me. So the long weekend, Thursday to Monday, was like a necessary cure for its own excesses. I had arrived in good shape, but in the days at the resort I gorged and lazed, and needed to recover from overdoing it. I looked forward to the austere simplicity of my camp in the desert.
At the banquet on the last night, a man sidled up to Frank, and from the way the man grinned and growled, from his teetering posture alone, I knew he was drunk. But I was half drunk, so I smiled back at him.
“That your spouse, Frank?”
“My brother,” Frank said, and the man became polite, chastened, and made respectful by brother, such a powerful word.
On the way to the airport the next day, sharing a taxi, I said, “This was really generous of you, Frank. I had a great time. I’m not used to such extravagance.”
“I thought it would do you good.”
That touched me—tenderness from someone who’d been so mean to me at times. I said, “I wish there was a way I could repay you.”
He said nothing, half his face was waxen and complacent, the other half reflective. When he was pondering an answer I always seemed to hear a whir, as of wheels spinning in his head, perhaps suggested by his way of humming when he was thinking hard.
“As a matter of fact,” he began, and nodded. “That gold you spoke about . . .”
I’d mentioned casually finding placer gold in the old dry streambeds, but had superstitiously understated my success. And though he’d been drinking at the time and had merely shrugged, my statement had registered. He clutched his face, drawing the two different sides together, creating a single expression that might have been despair.
“I could use a few bucks,” he said and honked softly. He became tearful. “Whitney dumped me.”
By then I’d paid the taxi, we were standing in the sunshine, among tall cabbage palms and an embankment of sprawling nopal cactus in front of the Acapulco Airport. In this tropical setting, with hibiscus and bougainvillea, and elephant-eared monastera vines spilling out of planters, Frank looked grief-stricken, the bright flowers and the abundant sunshine making it worse, the glory of the scene seeming to mock his bleak mood.
I said, “Of course.”
“Fidge,” he said. He gagged a little. “I’m staring into an abyss.”
He hugged me, and steadying him I could feel how thin he was, how insubstantial, the bones beneath his loose clothes. We’d been sharing the same bedroom, yet I had not noticed. Now, touching him, I knew he was fragile, and I was also aware of my strength, from my months of physical labor.
What Frank dreaded most in life, even as a boy, and keenly as a man, was failure. He was physically altered by Whitney leaving him—and what made it humiliating was that he’d only been married a few months. He was smaller and frailer and damaged, and I was ashamed of not having seen it earlier. My offer of money strengthened him a little, at least calmed him and made him seem hopeful.
“How much are we talking about?”
“Any amount,” he said in a tremulous voice.
“Five,” I said. “Ten?”
“Ten would be incredible. I’ll pay you back. Whitney has all my stuff. I’ve got nothing. I’m living in a tiny apartment in a three-decker in Winterville. Half the time the heating doesn’t work. Whitney got the house in Littleford, and the car and the dog, and she’s claiming mental cruelty and demanding alimony.”
He was still talking, and this was already more than I wanted to know. To interrupt him, I said, “If I get a good price for my gold, I might be able to raise fifteen.”
“Oh my god,” Frank said, and hugged me again, and I thought: There goes the spectrometer I was saving for, and the new suspension for my van. Frank’s ribs were like a warm basket under his damp shirt.
“This Acapulco thing has been great,” I said. “You’ve been really generous.”
I told him I’d need to sell my gold, and that I’d be in touch.
When I got back to Phoenix I called Paco Zorrilla and asked him if was interested in buying my gold. I’d heard of the rigged scales of some gold dealers, and the fluctuations of the gold price. I knew that the Zorrillas would be fair.
“The magnet worked!” Paco said.
Paco met me at a warehouse outside Phoenix and apologized for not inviting me to the house. But he’d come prepared, with a scale and tweezers and magnifying glasses and glass containers. We worked inside my van, with the curtains drawn.
“This is good,” he said, unscrewing the cap of my hoard and poking at the gold, flakes and nuggets, and jiggling the container, making the gold chuckle. He wore an expression of hunger, as though he was about to raise the cup to his mouth and swallow it all. He growled, “Oro.”
He shook the gold fragments onto the scale, a small cluster at a time, making notes on a pad, and sliding the gold into a new jar on a chute of folded paper. When he was done weighing it, he tapped at his calculator. “Twenty-two thousand and seven something—call it twenty-three.”
I mentally subtracted Frank’s fifteen thousand from that and gave myself eight, as I watched Paco unsnapping rubber bands from small stacks of bills. He handed over the money, and we hugged.
Before I left Phoenix to go back to my desert camp, I visited a bank and opened an account and arranged a wire transfer to Frank’s account. Because I had cash I was able to do it that very day. Giving him the money he needed somehow squared things. I was energized by giving money away—especially giving it to Frank, who was desperate. It was a good feeling, akin to power, bestowing it on him, something life-enhancing and mood improving. It reminded me of how long ago I’d rescued him in the black creek and given him life.
That act of mercy completed, I drove back to Quartzsite and bought provisions and had the ball joints in my van replaced, then headed into the desert. I camped nearer Castle Dome this time and spent the next five months prospecting, until the intense heat of early summer made the days unbearable. I suspended work, drove to California, and camped by the beach. By then I had enough gold to melt to an ingot, but instead of making a cast bar I made a mold and created a gold egg, the size of a small hen’s egg, twenty troy ounces of free gold.