“Gold Fever?” Excerpt 10 from “The G.O.D. Journal,” by Jeff Posey
Chapter 4, Part 1, from The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold , a novel by Jeff Posey. Read from the beginning here.
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Elby sat at the café waiting for Uncle Marsh. Each time the front door jingled she looked up, but only tourists came through. No locals. She wrapped her hands around a warm mug of coffee and people-watched out the picture window. A sullen teenage girl walked with her hands in her pockets behind her parents. Elby smiled and remembered her first time coming to Pagosa.
After her parents died in the wreck, Uncle Marsh left his university job and promptly moved here with Elby. She hated it and did everything she could to make life miserable for him. She ran away and hid in the woods all night. Tried hanging out with Hispanic guys who blared Mexican music from their car speakers. She saved her money and bought push-up bras with short-shorts and high-heel shoes. Her parents would have died if they hadn’t already been dead.
But Uncle Marsh did things in an infuriatingly different way. After the overnight runaway, he bought her a better parka so, he said, she would be warmer next time. When she began wearing outrageous teen fashion, he found catalogs of even more outrageous clothes and told her to buy what she wanted. She quickly spent $150, then tired of the whole thing and went back to blue jeans.
One time she threatened to get a tattoo, so he asked around and found the best tattoo artist at a shop in Farmington. Elby called Uncle Marsh’s bluff and rode all the way there with him, stood in line, watched a girl get started on a tattoo, and then freaked out and changed her mind. She wanted to scream because Uncle Marsh didn’t say a word. Until they drove back past Chimney Rock and then he started talking and wouldn’t shut up. He had just become a tour guide there, and he loved making up and telling Anasazi stories.
That had been almost twenty years ago. She realized he hadn’t told any Anasazi stories lately. He’d become more quiet and tired. And depressed? Had he become a sad old man?
After her rebellion, she settled down and made peace with Uncle Marsh, became friends. Because he always treated her like an equal, she came out of childhood with relative ease, considering what had happened to her. She developed a layer of grace over a heart of anger and uncertainty. Uncle Marsh had done as much as he could.
When she saw his lanky frame coming up the river walk toward the
café, she smiled. How could a man who walks with exuberance like that be depressed? She sometimes tried to categorize her feelings for Uncle Marsh, but he sprawled over several: beloved grandfather, best friend, crazy old man, infuriating psychologist, Zen master, professor. The perfect man? Hardly. He’d never married. Never seriously been involved with a woman (or a man, she thought with a tiny involuntary snort of laughter), which made him all the more alluring in her mind. Kind of a neuter, like herself. If she could find a younger version of Uncle Marsh, she would take his arm and hold on.
“There you are,” said Uncle Marsh.
Elby beamed at him.
Marshall Garvin signaled the waitress for coffee, but she already had it in hand, coming toward him.
“Elby’s a cup ahead of you,” said the waitress with a wide smile for Uncle Marsh.
“Well then, you drink slow and I’ll drink fast,” he said to Elby. “And you don’t let the well run dry, young woman,” he said to the waitress with a wink.
“Oh, I know all about you heavy afternoon drinkers,” the waitress said with a laugh.
Elby made a “yikes!” face. The waitress’s husband was one of the town’s most notorious drunks (and a taxidermist, which Elby found not only disgusting, but possibly immoral).
“Got news,” Marshall said when the waitress left.
Elby focused her attention on him, her hands still wrapped around her warm mug.
“New fellow in town. Baxter. Know that name?”
Elby wrinkled her forehead. She said it sounded familiar.
“Old-timers recognize it in a snap. Anyway, this fellow’s great-great-granddaddy was one of the founders of this town. Jedediah Aberdene Baxter.” Garvin took a few gulps of coffee, compared his level with Elby’s, and gulped some more. “Dammit! That’s too hot to drink fast.” He puffed through his mouth. Elby shook her head at him. “That’s why I never married me a woman like that waitress there. Not even thoughtful enough to let it cool a bit before serving it to a man. If this were a McDonald’s, I’d sue.”
Elby smiled and chuckled at his old-crotchety-man routine. She learned long ago his favored form of humor involved parody and sarcasm, delivered in a dry white-trash accent.
“So what about this Baxter fellow?” she prompted.
“Says there’s an Anasazi rock art symbol up beyond Fourmile. I told him he’s crazy. Nothing has ever been documented up there. But he says he’s got a journal from this Jedediah Aberdene Baxter that says so, though he wouldn’t show it to me.”
“He came to our house?”
“Yesterday right after lunch. You were out. Melba at the association pointed him to me. He went up to Chimney Rock looking for a rock art expert.”
“Melba said you’re a rock art expert?” She liked to tease him.
“Well I am and you know it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”
Garvin shifted his eyes around the room. “Had to think on it.” What he had to think on was how to keep Elby from wanting to tag along. He hadn’t come up with any good argument except that he didn’t trust Baxter.
Short description for The G.O.D. Journal: After he accidentally kills his wife, Baxter runs. Hiding in his derelict boyhood home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he discovers a journal that leads to a treasure of gold. With the guiding hand of a deranged hunter and Wall Street financier, Baxter discovers true gold is concealed in the heart of a woman who helps him search for an Anasazi pictograph that is key to his family treasure. Read the full description….
Hot Water Press publications scheduled for 2013: Annie and the Second Anasazi (a trilogy set in the year 2054), and Soo Potter (an Anasazi historical novel). To find out when they’re available, sign up for notification by email here.
