Series: Smile

Chapter Forty — Chuck’s Stew

Days went by and the revolution in Guatemala was dying. The rebels were losing, knowing from the start that they couldn’t win. But they had tried. The “election” was over.

Chuck had a problem. “Joe,” he said, “you remember that stew we started up in Arizona? When I first made it, I put in a big chunk of beef, some carrots, potatoes, onions, and a few other things and it was good.”

I nodded.

“The trouble is,” he went on, “we’re still eating that same stew.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The stew pot has never been empty, it’s still the same stew. At times, it’s been pretty thin, but it’s still that same darn stew, and I’m getting tired of it. In Mexico, about the only thing I could find to put in it was a chicken or two and some bananas, and in Guatemala, it got better because I put in a couple of armadillos. I put in a big fish, I found in San Salvador. I don’t know what kind it was, but it had teeth like a cat and was good eating. When we got to Honduras, I added more beef and some sort of a root I had never seen before. I put in corn and beans sometimes to give it body.”

“Why don’t you throw it out?”

“It would be a shame to throw away food with so many hungry people around. You see, the darn thing has been growing….”

“Growing?”

“It’s like this. I’ve boiled it down several times and put the concentrate in the refrigerator. I did that a while back when the stew wasn’t so good, then I poured it all together to see what I’d come up with.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t so good but I hated to throw it away, so I put in some pineapple, some papaya. That didn’t help because it needed more meat, so I put in an iguana lizard tail. Yet it still lacked something, so I poured in a bottle of Flor de Caña. Now, it’s the finest stew you’ve ever tasted.”

“Why don’t you eat it?” I asked sarcastically.

“There’s three gallons of the stuff. How can I eat three gallons of stew?”

“Great scot, man! Three gallons? Where do you keep it?”

“I’ve got everything full of it; I even have stew in the coffee pot.”

Chuck was indeed in great trouble.

“I’ll see what I can do to help you get rid of it.”

That afternoon I visited Fermin’s. Juanita gave me a hug and a kiss, and Fermin smiled as usual. “Business is good, thanks to you and little Juanita,” he beamed.

“I might steal her from you, Fermin. Very soon now — as soon as martial law is lifted, I’m going up to the mine and I’ll be lonesome without her.”

Juanita smiled happily and Fermin looked alarmed. “You cannot do this to me!” he moaned.

I changed the subject by saying, “Fermin, I have a deal for you. Now, listen carefully. Chuck is a real good cook and makes the best stew you’ve ever tasted. We were expecting company from the States so I asked him to cook up a big batch of it, but the company didn’t show up on account of the revolution. Now he has about three gallons of the stew on hand and no one to eat it.” My white lie about the visitors went over well.

“What kind of stew is it?” asked Fermin eagerly.

“That’s a secret, but it’s very tasty — made from an old Indian recipe that was given to Chuck by old Chief Rain in the Face of the Blackfoot Indians up in Idaho.”

I thought that would sound impressive. “Now I’ll tell you what we will do, Fermin. Chuck and I will bring the stew over and you can heat it and give Chuck and Argentina and Juanita and me free bowls full, and the rest you may sell. Three gallons is a lot of stew, Fermin.”

“It is, and I thank you,” he said.

I figured if I offered to make Fermin a present of the stew, he would think something was wrong and turn down the offer, but evidently it seemed like a good deal to him. So tonight we would have stew!

That evening as Chuck, Argentina, Juanita and I sat at the table waiting to be served, I ordered a bottle of Flor de Caña and Coke to ease the tension. Fermin had placed the table out on the sidewalk where it was cool. Chuck looked like a prisoner being tried for “Murder One” waiting for the jury’s verdict.

Soon a steaming bowl of stew was placed in front of each of us by Fermin himself; also, one each for Fermin and his wife. The stuff smelled good. I dipped my spoon into it and tasted. It was delicious.

“It’s wonderful!” said Fermin. “I must get the recipe from Chuck.”

In a few minutes the bowls were empty and we asked for second servings. I was obligated to pay for these and I did. Chuck looked pleased and relieved. The crowd walking by was attracted by the delicate aroma, and many people stopped to sniff, and many came into Fermin’s and ordered some of that “wonderful soup.”

Inside an hour the soup kettle was empty.

Chapter Forty-One — Gold!

Several days later martial law was lifted and everyone in town could come and go as they pleased. At last we were ready to start getting the machinery unloaded and transported to the mine.

I told Chuck and Jock, “All right, fellows, our vacation is over. We are going to forget about girls. We came here to mine gold and that’s what we’re going to do.”

It seemed good to be back to work and there were lots of preparations to be attended to. I made a deal with Ricky for the tractor and Chuck drove it from Talpaneca to the highway where it was loaded on a lowboy trailer to be hauled to Santo Domingo.

When we were within about twenty miles of our destination, the truck pulling the lowboy could go no farther. The roads were too crooked and steep. Bill had divided the dredge into two sections, each mounted on rubber tires; a clever job. When the machine reached its destination, the wheels would be taken off, it would be mounted on big logs and floated on the lake.

We worked furiously and got the dredge transported to where we had left the tractor. From here on we would use the tractor to pull the dredge. Weeks went by as we moved the equipment the last few miles, but at last the equipment was at “Rainbow’s End” — the name we had given our mine.

At the edge of the mud lake, Chuck was clearing away the jungle with the tractor to make a place for our camp. We hired a large crew of natives to help us. They felled the trees, cut them in sections to make lumber for our buildings. It was amazing how much lumber they could produce in a day.

Soon we had several buildings under construction. My shack of whipsawed boards was about thirty feet square and its roof was made of poles covered with grass. There was another shack going up for Chuck and one also for Jock. Down the trail a short distance we built three small cabins for native women we would hire to do our cooking and other chores. The dredge was being put together, so everything was going fine.

After another month had gone by the buildings were completed and the dredge was operating. We had mounted it on a big log raft. We had laid the raft holding the machinery on the mud at the edge of the lake. I told Chuck and Jock when to start the suction pumps, pumping mud up to the big sluice box on the side of the hill. We pumped first from under the raft to float it. When we finished we hoped to have a big lake, not of mud, but of water.

Our mud lake was in a valley high in the mountains. The creek running through it traveled very slowly, but as it escaped over the rocky cliff it was steep and the water went churning down the canyon and out to the sea. It was a perfect setup. The sluice box emptied into the fast water carrying away all the mud.

Our moment arrived at last.

The big diesel engine on the dredge was sweet music. The mud was going up the flexible pipeline to the sluice box and from there into the creek. The creek ran a dirty brown. A big hole appeared under the dredge, and water and mud kept rushing in, then the thing was finally afloat! Everything was working perfectly and the lake of water began to form. In about a week we had a lake about one hundred feet square and ten feet deep. We ran the dredge day and night, taking turns sleeping and never shutting it off.

Finally when we did stop the big engine, I said, “Okay fellows, we’ve run a lot of mud through that sluice so let’s go and see what we have. Maybe we’ve caught some gold up there.”

Chuck and Jock really got excited.

“I’ll bet there’s a hundred pounds of gold up there!” cried Chuck. “I’ll bet there’s more than that,” chimed in Jock.

We removed the first section of the riffles — as if there was gold this is where most of it would be. We cleaned out several hundred pounds of heavy material, mostly black sand and iron. This we took to the creek and began cleaning it up by panning it. A little gold settled at the bottom of each pan. Not much, but a little. In the final cleanup there was about five ounces.

Chuck and Jock were the two most disappointed boys I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t bear to look at them.

“Wipe that forlorn look off your faces fellows. I can plainly see that neither of you know much about mining gold.”

“What do you mean?” asked Chuck, a little sullenly.

I grinned at them. “This looks great fellows! Here is about one hundred and fifty dollars worth and we haven’t even started to mine for gold. We’ll go down to my cabin. I have a bottle of Flor de Caña and we’ll celebrate! Tomorrow, I’ll show you what I mean.”

The next day the dredge was anchored with cables so it couldn’t move around. The cables were attached to trees on the bank then each cable to a small windlass anchored to the dredge. By operating these we could guide the dredge up and down the pond, giving us perfect control of it. On the bottom of the suction pipe we attached a big rubber suction cup.

“You boys hold this cup on the bottom of the pond. It works like a vacuum cleaner. Be sure to cover every inch and keep moving it back and forth. Don’t miss a spot! Cover that bottom several times. I’ll operate the dredge.”

Very slowly I moved the dredge over and back across the pond, each time moving it a little farther out. I had the engine running wide open. We were not mining for mud now, we were mining for gold. All day long we kept going, and in the evening we switched on the lights and ran the operation all night.

We had found three women to do our cooking and washing, and they had moved into the three little cabins. Now and then they brought us platters of food and hot coffee. We kept going and by daylight the next morning we had covered the bottom of the entire pond.

“Shall we get a few hours sleep then go up to see what we have or shall we take a look now?” I asked. I knew what the answer would be. Chuck’s big hand dipped into the sluice box taking out a handful of concentrate. All we could see was black sand. He placed this in a gold pan and we walked down to the creek. He dipped the pan in the water, gave it a good shaking then started to twirl the water around and around. A yellow tail began to appear at the back. Around and around went the water and the tail was getting longer. Our eyes were getting bigger and we could stand it no longer. Chuck dropped the pan to the ground.

“Gold!” he yelled. “Gold!”

Jock and I joined in, and now all of us were yelling at the top of our voices, “Gold, gold, gold!”

Chapter Forty-Two — Disaster

In another week the fresh water lake had gotten larger and it would soon be time to clean up that gold plated bottom again. I told Chuck and Jock that at the rate we are going we would be here for about two years if the darn thing held up like that first cleanup. There was no need to say more. Chuck had built a box made of a hard wood of some sort. It was firmly nailed together and he had wrapped the box with some heavy wire.

“It’s just fourteen inches square inside,” he said. “When it’s full of gold it will weigh exactly one ton and be worth one million dollars.”

We were feeling fine that night as we sat there in my cabin. Everything was working out perfectly. The laws of the country read that for every foreigner employed, we must hire ten natives. Jock was from British Honduras, and Chuck and I from the States so that meant that we must hire at least thirty people. The cost was very little.

“What the devil are we going to do with thirty people?” I had asked Jock.

He had taken care of everything. He had hired the three women and some guards, then hired guards to guard the guards. Then he hired men to build cabins for the guards and to dig a well, so it wouldn’t be long until we had a well-equipped camp. We might even build a golf course. I had written Bill telling him of our fine progress, told him to bring down the two millionaire boys from Texas any time, that we were ready for them and could show them gold.

One day I said, “Somebody’s got to go to Managua for supplies because we’re running out of a lot of things. One of you boys will have to make a trip to the city.”

“Why don’t you go?” Jock put in. “Don’t you think you would enjoy a trip to the city?”

“I must stay here. I came here to do a job and I’m going to get it done.”

“How about your friends?” asked Jock. “Have you forgotten them? You haven’t sent them as much as one letter.”

I looked at the little guy, saw he was dead serious.

“You should at least send a note,” he persisted.

I shook my head, “Jock, I know three very lovely girls in Managua. I have started to write to them many times, but always torn up the letters. I guess I can’t think of the right words. I guess I’m a little bit confused, Jock, so maybe it’s better to try to forget them.”

“No, Señor Joe, you cannot forget them.”

I knew he was telling me the truth.

I said goodnight to the boys and started for my cabin. I came to the big mud oven and saw the log the natives had dragged up and set by the fire that was still smoldering. I sat down on the log and looked up at the stars. I began thinking of Connie.

A scream broke the stillness a woman’s scream followed by a pistol shot. I leaped to my feet just as Chuck and Jock came running up.

“What the hell is going on?” cried Chuck.

Another scream came from one of the little cabins — cabin number three. We ran down the path, guns in hand. As we approached a lighted cabin, the door swung out. A man leaning against the door casing formed a silhouette. He looked as if he were resting. Suddenly his legs wilted from under him and he fell out and rolled over in the dirt.

We ran up to him, saw the gaping hole in his chest and knew he was dead. We went into the cabin. Here stood one of our guards — now a one-armed man. His other arm lay on the floor. Blood was squirting like a fountain from his shoulder. A big bloody machete lay at his feet, evidently dropped there by his attacker.

Standing by the bed, stark naked and screaming shrilly was one of our young native cooks. We could do nothing for the dead man outside, but the guard needed help, or he would soon bleed to death. Jock ran out and soon came back with a piece of wire. He twisted this around the stub of the man’s arm. The crude tourniquet would stop the bleeding until we could find better assistance.

Women from the other cabins came in and put clothes on the girl, then began to clean up the bloody mess. I ordered a couple of guards to hitch a team of oxen to the big two-wheel cart, load in the dead man and the one-armed guard and take them to town. When they reached town they were to go directly to the Judge and he would know what to do.

A little later when Jock, Chuck and I were in my cabin, Jock said, “I talked to the girl and another woman and this is what they told me: The dead man, Manual, was a friend of the girl, but the guard too had been courting her. The guard had stolen into the cabin where he shouldn’t have been. Manual came in and caught his girl with the guard. Manual tried to slash the guard’s head off with his machete. The guard, trying to fend off the machete, raised his arm and it was cut off. The guard’s .45 caliber pistol was laying there, so he had grabbed it with the other hand and shot him dead.”

Trouble like this was something we had hoped to prevent. The dead man’s relatives would probably blame us for what had happened. We must do something drastic for this must not occur again.

The next day the Judge came out, but he didn’t blame us for the accident. He suggested that we not hire any single women.

“They will only cause you trouble,” he said. And the Judge was right!

All the unmarried women were discharged. We paid them for sixty days extra, which was the law.

That was the day Chuck and Jock went to town. I had given them a list of supplies to bring back, also I had told them, “We need women to do our cooking, so bring some back from the city. Get homely ones, big and fat; the kind who won’t cause trouble.”

They had been gone over a week and I was getting worried. They should have been back days ago. I would sure give them hell when I saw them, but then I would sure be glad to see them….

I got up from my bunk and turned off the tape recorder. I had been talking for hours. I went outside and looked around and up at the sky. The moon was just going down. It was nearly morning. I had finished telling my story as far as it had gone. What next?

This was a hell of an ending, I thought. Life is a game all right, like a game of cards, and I hadn’t yet learned to play. I walked back into the cabin and lay down, hoping I could get a few hours of sleep.

Chapter Forty-Three — The Palace Returns

The sun was high when I awakened. I got up and shaved and showered. Bill and the Texans could be in any day; maybe the Texans wouldn’t even come out to the mine. Maybe they would stay in the city and play with the Señoritas.

I picked up my Polaroid camera and decided to take some pictures for them to take home to show their wives. I had just finished snapping a picture of the big mud oven when I heard a truck — the Palace!

A warm glow came over me. How could I bawl out Chuck and Jock when I was so glad they were back. The Palace came bumping in over the rough road, swaying from side to side. I climbed up on a little bank and watched it. I saw three men in the cab.

Chuck brought the truck to a stop. He was grinning from ear to ear. There sat Jock and Chase beside him. They got out and just stood there weaving a little.

I roared at them, “You damned outlaws, what took you so long?”

All they did was grin.

“Been drinking, too, you darn villains! But welcome home!” The camera was in my hand so I snapped their picture.

“Did you get everything I sent you for?”

They nodded.

“Did you get some women?”

They nodded again.

“Well, get them out and I’ll take their pictures.” We walked around to the rear of the Palace, then I climbed up on the bank and waited. Chuck unlocked the door, pulled the ladder down and held up his hand. Down the stair-steps came Argentina!

For a second I stood there too astonished to utter a word. Then I started to laugh.

“Good going, Chuck old boy! You sure brought one girl these natives will leave alone.” I snapped a picture.

“Did you bring more?”

“Sure,” said Chuck.

“Well, get them out. I want to take more pictures.”

I counted to sixty, took the print out and was ready for another shot. I pointed the camera toward the back of the truck and was looking through the viewfinder as more females came walking down the steps. There were three of them.

“Stand closer together,” I said. “I can’t quite get you all in the picture.”

They obeyed and stood with their arms around one another. Something looked vaguely familiar and I was startled. I looked up. The camera fell from my hands. It hit a rock and rolled down the hill. There stood Connie, Juanita, Rosa….and little Tiny. They were all smiling at me.

This irritated me. I halted and said, “Where are you going, where do you come from?”

This usually was good for a smile, but Jock and Chase also wearing their best clothes didn’t smile.

“How come you two are looking like dandies?” I asked. “What for?”

Jock stepped up close to me there in the moonlight. As I looked down at the little fellow’s handsome face I saw how serious he was, and saw the strange look in those deep dark eyes.

“Is something bothering you?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What is it, Jock? You know I’m your friend.”

“I must tell you something,” he said softly.

He held out his hand and I took it in mine.

Suddenly he blurted out, “Señor Joe, Juanita and I are very much in love. It has been that way for a long time, have you not noticed?”

There were tears in his eyes.

“She loves you very much, Señor Joe, we both love you very much. Can’t you understand?”

For a moment I stood there looking down at the little fellow. A warmth spread over me.

“God bless both of you.”

“Señor Joe!”

“What is it, Jock?”

“You are breaking my hand!”

I put my arm around his shoulder, “Jock,” I said, and pointed to number three cabin. “There’s a light in the window for you. Hurry, man, hurry!”

Jock was off on a run.

Chase was still waiting.

“Now what the hell do you want?” I asked.

The expression on the handsome dark face of Chase didn’t change. He said a little uncertainly, “Señor Joe, Rosita and I were married two days ago.”

“You and Rosita?” I was flabbergasted.

Chase nodded. There was nothing more for me to say. I held out my hand again. He smiled as I pointed to the light in the number two cabin. He was gone.

I walked back and sat down on the log and looked up at the stars. “Everyone’s destiny is written there, the stars do not lie.” Never again would I doubt them.

The lights in cabins number two and three had gone out and a pitch candle was flickering in the window of cabin number one. It looked like a star beckoning to me.

I started slowly toward the light.

A little breeze had come up, and the light began to flicker I quickened my step and headed down the trail.

The End