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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Looking For Tonto
Benson Parker
Jared grew up in cycles. His parents alternated every six to eight months going from religious obsession wherein they went to church several times a week, read the Bible every night, and lived a right righteous life, to going on a full-tilt, months-long drunk. Bourbon replaced the Bible. Singing in church was replaced by singing to the moon. The only middle ground was when Jared’s parents would sometimes reach a stage of drunkenness where they fought, then Jared’s father would stagger the fifty yards to the railroad tracks, hop a freight train, and be gone for several weeks. Then one day they would look up, and there would be Dad walking up from the tracks, all dried out and contrite, ready to go to church.
When Jared was young, he spent a lot of time sitting cross-legged on the living room floor looking up at a seventeen inch black and white Zenith television. He didn’t know the William Tell Overture was from a Rossini opera written in 1829. To him, it was the Lone Ranger theme song; the music that took him away to splendid adventures in the old West where good always triumphed over evil. Jared wished he could climb inside the television and join the Lone Ranger and Tonto as they made the West safe for settlers. He was one of the two million boys who bought a Lone Ranger comic book every month in the 1950’s.
Some of Jared’s teachers and fellow students thought he was a little slow. He wasn’t slow; he lived in a world of his own imaging; he was distracted.
When he was fourteen years old instead of going to school every day, he would sometimes hike up into the mountains. He explored almost inaccessible mountains, canyons, and caves, and packed in supplies and ammunition for his .22 rifle. When he was fifteen, he left home. He didn’t run away he just left and stayed in the mountains, hunting, fishing, and prospecting. His parents didn’t notice he was gone for two weeks. After his remove from home, he would take roundance of towns except when he needed supplies.
One winter after almost dying, alone in the mountains, he came down and got a job in town. It had been five years. He bought a used pickup truck and got a job as a maintenance man at the Eckerd House in Burro City where he met a young nurse, Jilly, who talked a lot. He liked that. She had a pretty voice, and after all those years alone, he liked to listen to her chatter away. She’s the one who told him about Mr. Clayton.
“You should talk to him, Jared. He’s seventy-eight, been here two years, spent most of his life prospecting in Arizona, and since you would rather go prospecting on the weekends than be with me, you two would probably have a lot to talk about.”
The Eckerd House had been the mansion of “Burro” Bob Eckerd who discovered the gold lode that resulted
in a mining bonanza, and the founding of Burro City. After millions of dollars worth of gold had been extracted, the mine played out, and “Burro” Bob moved on to other adventures. His estate changed hands several times, and eventually, became the upscale retirement home known as the Eckerd House. It is a two-story Victorian, paneled with dark wood, and filled with antiques. The dining room and lounge are open to the public, and meeting rooms can be reserved. There are usually about twenty retirees paying handsomely to live there.
Mr. Clayton is somewhat removed until Jared tells him he spent five years in the mountains prospecting and living like a mountain man, then an instant bond forms between them.
Mr. Clayton beams at Jared, “Boy, I’ll tell ya it’s not like it used to be. Just after the turn of the century, there were hundreds of gold mines in Arizonie, and every crick, stream, mountain, and desert had prospectors out looking for color. And for every working mine, there were two more on paper that didn’t even exist.”
The old man laughs at that.
“And there was a brotherhood among us men back then, not like today. Oh, we might bamboozle some rich eastern investors, but betwixt us, we were honest and straight up. And I can remember when if you walked into town leading a mule, and you looked like a prospector, city dudes would come up to you in the street wanting to know if you had a claim you wanted to sell, or if you needed a grubstake. You could sell a Quit Claim Deed sight unseen just by showing a handful of samples and sounding sincere. Can you imagine? When I think of all the times since then when I’ve had to practically beg to get someone to stake me, or would have to sign a note to get twenty dollars worth of supplies. But back in the early part of the century, yeah, those were the days.”
To Jared, Mr. Clayton is a gold mine. He loves listening to the old man’s stories, and he believes most of them. Their conversations usually take place after Jared’s workday is over, while sitting in rocking chairs on the side porch, watching the sunset.
Jilly pretends to be jealous because Jared spends so much time listening to Mr. Clayton instead of listening to her.
She fakes a pout, “Well, I guess I should be thankful Mr. Clayton goes to bed by nine o’clock, or you’d be out there gabbing with him all night.”
“Don’t be silly, Jilly. You know it gets too cold to be sitting outside all night. Course, if you brought us some blankets and hot chocolatex”
She shakes her tiny fist at him, “The only thing I’m bringing you is a fist sandwich.”
Jilly works Monday through Friday at the Eckerd and sometimes comes by on Sunday afternoon when there are more visitors. She treats each of the residents like the grandparents she never knew; she loves them, and they love her. She has soft brown eyes, and a quick smile.
“Mr. Clayton, sir, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s your first name?”
Mr. Clayton looks at Jared as if he is crazy, “Clayton.”
“Oh, all this time I thought Clayton was your last name. Well, what is your last name?”
“Harris. It was that Jilly, your little girlfriend that started the Mr. Clayton stuff. I don’t know why she started calling me that, but now everyone thinks my name is Mr. Clayton. It’s Clayton Harris, how hard is that? She’s a cute little thing though isn’t she? If I were just a few decades younger, I’d be giving you a run for your money with her. You gonna ask her to marry you?”
Jared looks alarmed, and glances around to see if anyone has overheard, “Shhh! Good Lord man, don’t be saying things like that. Neither one of us has even thought about that.”
“You may not have thought about it, but I’ll bet she has. I talk to her every day, well I guess I should say, I listen to her every day, and she never fails to mention your name. She’s a find, boy you oughta stake a claim on her.”
Jared purposefully changes the subject, “So what was prospecting like during the Depression?”
Clayton gives Jarod a raised eyebrow look that means, ‘I’m telling ya’, boy,’ before he sits back to reminisce about the old days.
“Well, before the Depression hit, copper was king in Arizonie, still is I guess, but during the Depression production went way down, and some mines closed. Strangely enough, this encouraged gold mining because as the price of goods dropped, the relative value of gold went up. So some old abandoned gold mines reopened, and a lot of unemployed men went out, and worked the streams. But in ’34 the government outlawed private ownership, then in ’42 L-208, the gold mine closing order closed all the gold mines because of the war. Course, that didn’t stop desert rats like me from prospecting and panning. How ‘bout you? Tell me about some of your finds.”
“Compared to you I haven’t found anything, but you’ll like this. One time I followed the sound of heavy equipment through the mountains until I came to where I could see a crew working on a road. I stayed outta sight and watched as they fitted a huge metal culvert into a ravine. The culvert was round, galvanized iron with alternating ridges and grooves, corrugated. It was large enough to stand up in and twenty yards long.”
“Yeah, I know what a culvert is.”
“Hey, I don’t have as many stories as you do so I’m trying to stretch mine out.”
Clayton laughs.
“Anyway, the next morning as I was waking up, I was still half asleep, it dawned on me that the culvert might act as a riffle does in the bottom of a sluice.”
Clayton raises his brows, “Hmmm.”
“So I went back and checked on it every week or so for several months, and then one day when I looked into it, the bottom of the culvert was covered with black sand from runoff, or a flashflood. There was a flat three-foot wide strip of sand from one end to the other. I went to the middle of the culvert and dug down to the bottom of a groove, and sure enough, there it was; tiny grains of gold mixed with the black sand.”
“Hot damn boy! That was pretty smart of you. A ready-made sluice just sitting there. How’d it feel when you looked down, and saw that color?”
Jared smiles, “You know how it felt. I let out a holler that boomed out of both ends of that culvert and could probably be heard miles away.”
“How much did you get out of it?”
“I got twenty ounces the first time, but it was too much work. I had to throw the top layer of sand aside, scoop the gold bearing sand into buckets, carry them what seemed like a half mile to the nearest water, then pan the gold from the sand.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ve found little pockets of rich hard rock that was so inaccessible, and so far from water, that it wasn’t worth fooling with. Still a find is a find, and there’s nothing that compares to it. Did you look for the source?”
“Of course I looked, I looked for weeks and never did find it.”
One Monday morning, Jilly stops by Mr. Clayton’s room, “How are you this fine morning, Mr. Clayton?”
“I’m tip top little lady, how are you?”
“Great.”
“Did you and Jared go out this weekend?”
“We went to a movie Friday night, but then he went camping in the mountains for the rest of the weekend.”
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
Jilly pretends to be offended, “Mr. Clayton! Please! I can’t believe you would suggest such a thing. What
kind a girl do you think I am? Besidesx he’s never asked me to.”
“Okay, sorry, didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers there. It’s just that he talks about you all the time, so I figuredx”
Clayton is lying.
Jilly beams, “Does he really?”
“Yeah, he’s crazy about you.”
That afternoon Jilly sees Mr. Clayton sitting alone in the recreation room watching television. She goes in, sits in the chair beside him, and looks at the television, “I’ve seen this one.”
“Well I haven’t Missy, so be quiet.”
“It’s the one where the Lone Ranger disguises himself as a prospector. In the movies, prospectors are always old men. Why do you suppose that is? They couldn’t have all been old. I mean, you’re old now but you weren’t old all your life while you were prospecting. I’ll bet old prospectors were better prospectors though because they had more experiencex”
Clayton turns his head and looks at her with a deadpan expression.
She doesn’t notice, “Younger prospectors probably tried to hang around with older prospectors to learn from them - just like Jared has probably learned a lot
talking with you. Where is Jared anyway, have you seen him lately? He said he was going to the hardware store to get some light bulbs, but that was an hour ago. He’s probably just out riding around, getting paid to ride around town, must be nice. I x”
Clayton watches Tonto leap on Scout and ride away. Jilly rattles on.
Jared is tall and lean, rangy, with a calm, deliberate demeanor. He likes working at the Eckerd House because there are a wide variety of things to do, and the owners leave him alone to work at his own pace. He shovels coal into the basement furnace, keeps wood cut for the many fireplaces, paints whatever needs painting, and repairs whatever needs repairing. Jilly once asked him if there was anything he couldn’t fix, and he replied, “If I sit and look at something long enough I can usually figure out how to fix it.”
One afternoon Jared asks Clayton, “How many claims have you filed in your life?”
“Oh Lord, I don’t even know, dozens. I’ve filed on gold, silver, turquoise, lead, saltx I filed a homestead on a spring one time.”
Jared looks incredulous, “What?”
“Yeah, it was back in the thirties, out in the desert east of Wikieup. I knew it was the only water for miles around, so I filed on it, and sure enough, a few years later a rancher bought it off me. I never did file on that last find I made though, and it showed promise.”
Jared is intrigued, “Tell me about it.”
“It wasn’t far from here, in the Bradshaws, about eight or ten miles as the crow flies, and up about seven thousand feet on a ridgeline. There was a solid mass of white quartz with a horizontal, pencil thin fault line running for about eight feet. I pounded up and down the line with my hand pick, but didn’t expose anything. But it just felt right, you know? If you spend enough time out there looking, sometimes you just get a feeling. So I beat a little hole in the line, put a quarter stick of dynamite in, and blew it. And there it was. The quartz was shot through with gold, maybe ten percent gold.”
“Wow! So what happened? Why didn’t you file?”
“I was on my way to, when I had my first heart attack, spent two weeks in the hospital, and then ended up here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Two years.”
“You mean you were still prospecting when you were seventy-six?”
“Yeah, I was still in pretty good shape until then, but it’s been downhill ever since.”
Jared feels bad for Clayton, “Hey, why don’t we go up there this Saturday do a little pokin’ around, and maybe we’ll find it again? Do you remember where it was?”
“I don’t know, it’s been a long time and my memory is one of the things that has gone downhill. But it would be nice to get up in the mountains again.”
“Did you put up a marker?”
“No, as a matter of fact I piled some brush up over the hole to hide it. But as I was leaving, I stepped off thirty-four paces due north, drove a spike into the biggest Ponderosa Pine on the ridge, and left about four inches of it sticking out about waist high.”
Jared, “I say we go for it, what do you say? It’s not like you’ve got anything else to do this Saturday.”
Clayton laughs, “Or any other day as far as that goes, but you know I can’t do any climbing.”
“If you can get us in the general area, I’ll do the climbing.”
“Okay, sounds good. Why don’t you ask Jilly to go?”
Saturdays in the mountains become the high point of the week for the three of them. Clayton is sure that the old logging road they take is the right one, he just can’t remember where he left the road, and headed up into the mountains. Sometimes Jilly hikes with Jared, and sometimes she stays with Clayton near the truck. Clayton shuffles around gathering wood, and builds a fire, while Jilly sets up camp, prepares food, and talks.
She stretches a tarp up between some trees and is rummaging around in the back of the truck, while Clayton reclines on a blanket under the tarp, watches the fire, and listens to Jilly with a slight smile on his lips.
“I wish Jared would hurry up and get back. He’s such a sweetie; did you know he doesn’t drink? Not even a beer. But he won’t go to church, I asked. And he doesn’t talk about his childhood. I asked about his parents and he said he didn’t know them very well. What kind of an answer is that, didn’t know them very well? I tell myself he’s mysterious, but what if he’s on the run from the law? A bank robber, or kidnapper? Who am I kidding? I wouldn’t care; I’d run from the law with him. Sounds kinda exciting actually. Jilly and Jared blazing a trail across the southwest with the law hot on their heels. Falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit but unable to prove his innocence, he begs Jilly to leave him and go back home, but she refuses. They hide out in the mountains, and live off the land. He goes out hunting while she turns their little campsite into a homex”
Clayton has drifted off to sleep, and dreams he is flying over sun-kissed mountains.
After a couple of months, Jilly says to Jared, “Don’t you think Mr. Clayton made up that story about the gold to get you to take him into the mountains?”
“No. He didn’t have to make up a story, he could have just asked, I would’ve taken him.”
“Well, I love that old man, but I think he might be telling you what he thinks you want to hear.”
“Jilly!”
“Sorry, but because I’m not a prospector, or prospectress, I think I may be seeing things more clearly than you.”
“Prospectress? Made up the story about the gold? Well, there goes your percentage.”
“Yeah, right. Don’t get me wrong; I think what you’re doing is great. It’s very nice of you.”
“What? Taking you for an outing on the weekends?”
“Are you this funny with everyone, or is it just me?”
Late one Saturday afternoon as they are getting ready to head back to town, Clayton points to a distant ridge,
“See that ridge over there? When I die, I want you two to hike up there and throw my ashes to the wind. That’ll be a beautiful place to spend eternity.”
Jared and Jilly exchange uncomfortable looks, each waiting for the other to say something, finally Jared says, “Aww, you ain’t gonna die old man. Get in the truck.”
Jilly’s eyes are full when she takes Mr. Clayton’s hand, looks into his eyes for a second, looks down, and gives her head a little nod. It is one of the hardest things she has ever done.
Before getting in the truck, Clayton takes the axe and notches a tree.
A few days later, Clayton Harris dies in his sleep.
Jared parks beside the notched tree, then he and Jilly struggle up to Clayton’s ridge where they sit down, exhausted, and share a canteen of water. Jared cuts the tape on the cardboard box holding Clayton’s remains and looks inside. It looks more like gravel than ashes. He walks over to a rock precipice, says something that Jilly can’t quite hear, and then broadcasts the contents of the box in a broad, sweeping arc.
He sits back down beside Jilly. She isn’t crying, but she is solemn. They sit in silence for a long time, and then Jared says, “You ready to start back down?”
“Yes.” She stands up, takes a few steps, and then says, “What’s this?” as she points to a spike that is sticking out of the biggest Ponderosa Pine on the ridge.
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