The Impossible Coin (The Downwinders Book 2) (2 page)

“I’m not saying I don’t trust
him,” Deem said. “I guess I do. He seems like a straight-up guy. But… ” She
paused. “There’s no part of you that wonders if what we just did was right?”

“Nope,” Winn said. “Fuckers had it
coming.”

Deem rolled her eyes and cracked
the window. The cabin quickly filled with hot air and Winn saw Deem’s hair fly
around her head.  “I want to try and get this pot smell off my clothes before
we get home,” she said.

After a quick stop in North Vegas
to let Deem refill her soda, they shot straight for Moapa. Winn parked his Jeep
next to Deem’s pickup truck in the driveway to his trailer. Even though it was
dusk, hot dry air assaulted them when they opened the doors to the Jeep, and
Deem hurried to get into her truck and crank the A/C. Winn waved goodbye as she
drove off to her home in Mesquite, a half hour away.

He pulled his shirt up and over
his head and walked into his trailer. He turned on the cooler and retrieved a
beer from the fridge. Then he walked back outside to sit at his outdoor table –
a large, overturned cable spindle. He put his boots up on it, and rocked back a
little in the camping chair, slipping the cold beer bottle into the chair’s beverage
holder. He lit a cigarette and exhaled a long stream of smoke straight up into
the air. Bats were dancing overhead, sucking up the day’s insects. A couple of early
stars were out, and more seemed to appear the longer he looked.

He glanced at his trailer – the
one he bought just after he sold his mother’s. When she died, the only thing of
value she left was her trailer. He knew he couldn’t keep living in it; it reminded
him too much of her. So he sold it and bought another. It was planted in the
exact spot where her trailer had stood, after they moved to Moapa from Tucson.

The wind picked up a little,
offering a moment of relief from the heat. Winn felt the sweat on his body soak
in the air, cooling him. A little dust blew up from the ground under the
spindle, into his face, and he coughed.

I should never have spread her
ashes here,
he thought, the same thing he thought whenever it was dusty
outside and it blew in his face.
I could have taken them somewhere else,
Lake Mead, or Snow Canyon, somewhere like that. But no, I had to be lazy and
spread them right here, thinking this was all she deserved. Now she invades my
lungs every time the wind kicks up. Still bugging me from the grave.

He crushed the cigarette into an
ashtray on the table and got up, pulling his beer from the cup holder. He
walked into the trailer. The cooler didn’t take long to make the air in the
trailer tolerable. He kicked off his boots, letting them fall on the kitchen
floor, and walked back to the bathroom, stripping off his clothes as he went.
He started the shower, and waited for the water to reach the right temperature.

He looked down at himself, then up
at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Exposed. Deem seemed to think she
didn’t know that much about me,
he thought.
She doesn’t need to know
everything. She knows about my mother, that she was gifted, that she was
absent. Deem freaks out about anything sexual, so there’s no point in telling
her about the women or the men I’m seeing. I hope she knows I’m loyal to her.
I’d help her with anything she needed, and I think she’d do the same for me.
But she doesn’t need to know everything about me. Everyone has some things they
keep to themselves. There are some things that don’t need to be told.

He got into the shower and washed
the day away, letting the water run over him and cool him down. He felt a
hundred percent better.

After he dried off, he walked back
to his bedroom, still naked, and laid down on the bed, letting the air from the
cooler blow over him. He reached for the clicker and turned on the TV, flipping
through channels, looking for something to take his mind off Deem’s
conversation. The more he tried to avoid it, the more it bothered him. ‘
There
are times when I feel like I hardly know you,’ she said, like she wanted to
know more. Should I change that? Should she learn more about me? She may not
like what she learns. And what was all that about unintended consequences?

He began to feel a little sick as
dread washed over him. He closed his eyes. For a moment he panicked, worried
that sleeping would invite the horrors from the past, but then he relaxed,
remembering that the horrors were gone. Paid for. They hadn’t come in years.
There was no reason to fear sleeping anymore; they had been banished a long
time ago, and sleeping had been safe for over a decade now.

Still, he couldn’t stop the
dreaming, and the moment he closed his eyes always seemed to unnerve him,
afraid of what the night might bring.
Idiot,
he thought.
You fixed
it, he won’t be there. What was the point of paying the price if you
continually imagine him showing up?

▪ ▪ ▪

Carma raised a wine glass and
said, “To Awan and his team! Indian Springs owes you all a debt of gratitude
that they have no idea they’ve incurred, and will never repay. But I intend to
repay you, with a piece of pecan pie drizzled with a warm rum sauce and whipped
cream!”

There were groans around the table
as people contemplated trying to eat more. Carma had already stuffed them with
savory pies. Wine glasses clinked, and Deem said, “Honestly, Carma, I can’t eat
another bite!”

“Now I know you’re lying, and you’re
so awfully thin, my dear,” Carma replied. “A man likes a little something he
can hold on to.” Deem began to blush. “These pecans were grown in the orchard
right outside, and they have properties that will make you irresistible to
men.”

“I’ll have a piece,” Winn said.
Deem looked up at him and snickered. He enjoyed saving her from situations that
embarrassed her, though he wasn’t above creating those same situations from
time to time.

“Excellent!” Carma said, clapping
her hands together. “I’ll dish it up in a little bit, so prepare yourselves!”

“I don’t know what you put in
these pies,” Winn said, forking another lump of meat and crust into his already
stuffed mouth. “They’re sick!”

Carma turned to Deem. “That’s
good, right?”

“Yes, very good,” Deem said.

Carma raised a hand to her
forehead, rubbing it. “It’s been incredibly difficult to keep up with current
vernacular over the years, but I must say, I have tried my best. ‘Cool’ was
extremely confusing for me, but now I think I’ve got it down. It means the
opposite, right? My pies don’t make him sick, right?”

“Correct,” Deem assured her.

“It’s like, your pies are so good,
it’s sickening,” Winn said. “Are you sure there isn’t some Sweeney Todd action
going on here?”

“I assure you there is nothing
human in these pies!” Carma said, smiling. “Well, not that I’m aware of, at any
rate. Deem, more wine?”

“I think I’ve had enough wine,
too,” Deem said.

“You’ve certainly developed a
taste for it, haven’t you?” Carma said. “And now that you’re not
excommunicated, you’ll have to repent for each and every gulp!” She smiled.

“I’m going to wait for a while,
and repent after I’ve got a good batch of sins built up,” Deem said.

“That’ll take years,” Winn
cracked.

“Awan, how long before the blood
souring takes? Is it immediate?” Carma asked.

“Yes,” Awan answered. “It’ll taint
their offerings right away, they’ll all be rejected. The Callers will abandon
them. I’m going to go around town and tell people they can stop paying. It’ll
take longer for the kidney trouble to show up.”

“I appreciate that you don’t want
to kill them outright,” Carma said, leaning forward and pouring another glass
of wine for Deem, who tried to object but was ignored. “Back in the day people
would find themselves strung up or cut for the littlest offenses. Things seem
so much more civilized now. Why don’t all of you take your wine glasses into
the sitting room, and we’ll relax and chat in there for a while.  I love these
chairs, but my butt hurts after more than an hour in them.” Carma immediately
rose from the table and grabbed her glass, walking into the other room, leaving
the others behind.

Winn noticed that Deem seemed a
little wobbly as she stood. “If you decide to drink that glass Carma just
poured for you, just sip at it,” he said.

“Of course she’s going to drink
it!” Carma hollered from the other room.

“I’ll go slow,” Deem said, looking
at Winn and smiling. “So this is what feeling drunk is?”

“Yes,” Winn said, walking around
the table and taking her by the hand. “And you don’t want to go any further, or
you’ll know what praying to the porcelain god is.”

“Huh?” she said, following him
into the sitting room.

“Trust me, you don’t want to
know,” Awan said, following her.

They walked down a couple of steps
and landed in the room filled with sofas and chairs. Winn watched as Deem set
her glass carefully on a side table and plopped into her favorite chair. Winn
dropped onto a sofa and Awan sat next to him.

“God, I love this view!” Deem
said, staring out the large floor to ceiling windows that faced the back yard
and the hill that rose dramatically behind the house, lit with little yard
lights. Bugs hovered around the lights and she could see bats darting back and
forth, snapping up insects.

“I talked with Lyman earlier
today,” Carma said, entering the room with a tray filled with cordials. She set
the tray down on a table near the windows. “Help yourself to any of these you
want.” She walked to an oversized chair and sat in it. “He was wondering, Deem,
if you’d be willing to help him out with a little project.”

“What?” Deem asked.

“Naturally he asked me to have you
talk to him about it yourself,” Carma said. “You know how he likes you.”

“What time?” Deem asked, blushing
again.

Carma checked her watch. “Let’s
see, it’s just after nine, and the moon’s out around two. About five hours from
now. I hope you can stay.”

“Sure,” Deem said, leaning back in
her chair.

“Lyman does seem to have his
finger on the pulse of what’s happening around here,” Awan said. “And he seems
highly intuitive. I’m still impressed on how he picked up on Winn.”

“That’s right,” Deem said. “He was
the one who knew about you being ‘blank,’ just from meeting you. It’s what
wound up saving us from Ninth Sign.”

“Did you ever figure out what that
was about?” Carma asked Winn. “Why you’re a blank? We didn’t talk much about it
after it happened.”

Winn considered how to respond.
When he’d first found out he was blank, and was used to hide things from Ninth
Sign, he felt embarrassed. Although it surprisingly wound up being an asset in
that case, he always figured his deficiency would be a liability, and he still
worried that it might hamper his ability to help Deem and Awan going forward.

Deem’s words to him the other
night about not knowing much about him had been rattling around in his mind,
and the mixture of the company and the wine made him feel relaxed, as though he
could open up to these people without fear of judgment or repercussion.

“Well, I have been thinking about
that,” he said. “And I think I know why I’m blank.”

“You do?” Awan asked. “Why?”

“Well, it’s a long story,” Winn
said. “And you may not like it.”

“Oh, I’m sure I will like it!”
Carma said with enthusiasm, delighted at the prospect of Winn telling a tale.
“Doesn’t matter how it ends. I’ll like it.”

“I’m warning you, it’s long,” Winn
said.

Deem closed her eyes and sunk
further into her chair. “I’d like nothing better right now than to relax and
hear it,” she said.

“Me too,” Awan said.

“Alright,” Winn said. “If you
insist.”

“I insist!” Carma said, jumping
out of her chair. “Just let me adjust the lights down in here. This room is too
brightly lit for a good long story!” She walked to a dimmer on the wall, and
lowered the level of light coming from the overhead fixtures. The lights
outside became brighter, and Carma walked back to her chair. “There we go.
Alright, Winn, begin!”

Winn took a deep breath and
exhaled. “When I was eleven, my mother and I lived in a trailer court outside
of Tucson…”

Winn rested his head against the
plywood platform in the tree and turned up the volume of his CD Walkman. Above
him was a sea of green leaves and branches, swaying gently, creating a perfect
hypnotic visual to The Dandy Warhols in his ears. Brent was supposed to meet
him here, any minute. Spare time was always spent listening to music.

He felt the platform shift a
little under him. Last month he and Brent had secured the platform with an
extra round of nails, nervous that it might slip out of the tree if they didn’t
take steps to make it more stable. Now he felt comfortable that it wasn’t going
anywhere, thanks to Marty, who had loaned him the tools to do the job. Marty
was an old man who lived in the trailer court and had always been friendly to
Winn ever since they moved in years ago. He even contributed some of the ¾ inch
plywood they used to make the platform.

He sat up and looked down into the
trailer court. No sign of Brent yet, so he laid back down. To reach the
platform, you had to climb up the back of Winn’s trailer, then jump to a
branch, and from there, climb the rest of the tree. Winn’s mom didn’t like them
climbing on the trailer, so they had to do it quietly when she was around,
which wasn’t often. She was usually at work, or occupied in the trailer with a
boyfriend. When she was occupied, she was louder than their climbing.

The droning music in his ears made
him feel like floating, so he slipped into the River and let himself rise a
foot or so above his body. A couple of weeks ago he’d been lying on his bed,
daydreaming, when he closed his eyes and found he could drift into a place
where he could see unusual things. He turned over and saw himself lying on the
bed, and it had scared him so badly he forced himself to open his eyes. He
found that he quickly returned to his body and everything was normal.

When he summoned enough courage,
he tried it again, not turning to look at himself. His bedroom changed in
little ways – some things were dimmer, and some things changed color. For a
while he thought he was dreaming, and that somehow he’d been able to stay awake
during the dream.

He only told two people about it –
Marty and Brent. Brent seemed skeptical of it until Winn demonstrated it for
him by hiding under a blanket while Brent held up a series of numbers with his
fingers, and Winn had been able to name the series exactly. After that, Brent
spent a good deal of time trying to emulate Winn’s ability, but not succeeding.
He asked Winn for details on how he made it happen, hoping he could duplicate the
effect Winn described. It never seemed to work for Brent.

Winn considered talking to his
mother about his ability, but decided against it. Rifts between them had
increased recently, as Winn became more outspoken about his dislike of the
various boyfriends she brought home. Winn’s mother worked as a waitress at a
lounge a couple of miles from the trailer court, and she frequently brought
home a patron. Winn had grown used to the noises coming from his mother’s
bedroom – it was a trailer, so you could hear everything. The guys she brought
home always seemed to drink everything in their refrigerator and never
replenished what they took, and that pissed Winn off. He complained to his mom
about it, and they argued. She always won their arguments, with Winn being
ignored for a few days as punishment for crossing her.

So he told Marty about his ability
instead of his mother. Marty didn’t talk down to him, and he knew he’d at least
hear him out before scoffing. Marty seemed surprised when he told him, and he
offered to prove it the same way he’d proved it with Brent, but instead Marty
said that he believed him and he didn’t need to prove it. He also told him it
was called ‘the River,’ and not to tell other people about his ability, that it
wasn’t a good idea to make it known to others. Winn hadn’t thought to ask him
how he knew what it was called.

That was weeks ago. Since then,
Winn found himself willing to venture a little further than just hovering above
his body. He had managed to float a few feet away, always staying within his
room. He felt that as long as he could see his body, he could return to it.

He found it particularly easy to
slip into the River when he was listening to The Dandy Warhols, and as the
music droned repetitively in his ears he let himself drift up and look over the
edge of the platform, surveying the trailer court. He could see his trailer
below him, and to the right, three trailers away, the trailer Brent’s family
lived in. Still no sign of Brent yet. Between their trailers and across the
driveway lived Jeanette with her little rat dog, Ears. The outside chair that
Jeanette usually sat in was empty at the moment, so she wasn’t on patrol,
spitting out comments and yelling at her dog. Winn didn’t mind her, though she
scared some of the other kids in the trailer park. He thought she was
entertaining, even when she got drunk and started screaming obscene things as
people walked by.

To the far left, toward the back
of the court, lived Marty. He had a nice double-wide trailer in a shady,
secluded spot at the end of one of the driveways. The yard around his trailer
was well maintained, like a real yard outside a normal house, with a small lawn
and a fence. It looked like he’d lived in the trailer court for a long time.

Marty was one of the first people
Winn had become friends with when he and his mom moved in. Back then, Marty’s
wife, Rita, was still alive, and she made lemonade and invited kids from the
trailer park into their home for a drink. When she died a couple of years ago,
the lemonade stopped, but Winn had still visited Marty frequently. He knew
Marty was lonely, and he felt sad for him. Marty told him he’d been married to
his wife for thirty-three years.

Beyond the trailer court, past
Marty’s trailer, was open desert. They were on the outskirts of a Tucson
suburb, and most of the new development had gone in the opposite direction.
That was fine by Winn; he and Brent loved to explore in the desert, slipping
under the chain link fence at the back of the property and disappearing into
the bush, discovering garbage in washes and capturing lizards. Recently they’d
been bolder and gone as far as the hills. It took a good twenty minutes in the
hot sun to reach the hills, but things cooled down once you got there, as there
were trees with shade as you entered a small canyon.

Winn wanted to drift in that
direction and explore some more, but he wasn’t comfortable leaving his body
alone on the platform. He could faintly hear the music, back in his physical
ears:
“If I could sleep forever…”
What if he were to roll off? What if
Brent showed up, and thought he was dead? What if birds found him, and pecked
out his eyes?

 Instead, he dropped back into his
body, feeling the oddness of the River leave him, replaced by the sleepy
melancholy of the music.
Just wait here for Brent,
he thought.
Listen
to the music and wait.

▪
▪
▪

It was now well past the time
they’d agreed to meet, and Winn decided to leave the treehouse and ride his
bike around the trailer court, looking for Brent. As he was descending onto the
trailer, Brent rounded the corner of it and stopped dead in his tracks,
watching Winn climb down. He was holding something.

“You’re ditching me?” Brent asked.

“You’re a half hour late,” Winn
said, a little irritated. Brent was always paranoid that Winn was trying to
ditch him. This wasn’t the first time Brent had mistaken his own lateness for
some lack of loyalty from his best friend. It was an aspect of Brent that Winn
liked the least, and he didn’t think he should have to defend himself for it –
but he did, anyway. “I was coming to look for you.”

“My dad kept me, made me clean up
the trailer before I could go,” Brent said. “You won’t believe what I read in
here!” He held up a book.

“Yeah?” Winn asked skeptically,
heading back up the trailer and into the tree. Brent followed. “What?”

“There’s a fortune of gold buried
around here somewhere,” Brent said. “Buried in a cave with an iron door. It’s
been around for hundreds of years, and no one has ever found it. If we could
find it, we’d be rich!”

“Bullshit,” Winn said.

“No, it’s true,” Brent said,
reaching the platform and opening the book for Winn to see. “Look… ‘the fabled
Escalante treasure’…”

“Fabled means it’s a fairy tale,”
Winn said.

“No, this is a history book,”
Brent said. “It was buried by priests in the 1700s, when they were under attack
from Apaches. They had a huge mine, full of treasure, because they’d been
forcing the Indians to mine for them, and they decided to hide it. So they
covered the mine with an iron door, and buried it so no one could find it!
People have been looking for it ever since. I’ll bet we could find it, if we
tried!”

“If people have been looking for
it for hundreds of years, what makes you think we could find it?”

“I don’t know,” Brent said,
looking at the drawings in the book. “But look at this! See how much gold is in
there? We’d be rich!” He held the book up for Winn to see.

Winn looked at the drawings,
someone’s interpretation of what the inside of the Escalante mine might look
like. There were piles and piles of gleaming gold, shining in the darkness of a
cave. It did look enticing.

“Can you imagine how rich we’d be
if we could even get a handful of that?” Brent said. “We’d be billionaires! I’d
buy a Porsche.”

“I’d take a trip to Disney World,”
Winn said, some of Brent enthusiasm beginning to rub off on him. “Heck, I’d
move to Florida and live right next to Disney World.”

“I’d move with you,” Brent said.
“We could go every day. We’d buy annual passes, and we could walk right in and
buy anything we wanted.”

“I’d buy every CD at Tower,” Winn
said. “My CD collection would be huge.”

Brent smiled, happy that he’d
converted Winn. “Let’s start looking for it! It’s gotta be around here
somewhere.”

“Sure,” Winn said. “You’re positive
it’s still out there?”

Brent returned to his book. “This
says it was never found. Lots of people have tried to find it, but no one ever
has.”

“Maybe it doesn’t really exist,”
Winn said. “You sure it isn’t all made up?”

“No, it’s real,” Brent said.
“There was a Father Kino, he was in charge of the priests. And they hid the
mine.”

Winn’s mind raced. He was lucky to
get two dollars a week from his mom, if he did chores and she didn’t accuse him
of something that negated the allowance. If he had billions, he could do
anything he wanted. He could buy his mother a house, and he could buy his own –
so he’d be able to live the way he wanted, without her always on his case to
clean things. And he could get a really nice bike, like a motocross bike,
something tricked out. And he could replace the torn backpack he took to school
every day with one of the nice ones that the rich kids had. Maybe he’d be rich
enough that they could hire teachers to come into his new home, in Florida next
to Disney World, and teach him right there, instead of him having to go to
school with other kids.

The more he thought about Brent’s
proposal, the more he liked the idea.

“Alright,” Winn said. “I’ll help
look for it. We split anything we find, fifty-fifty, OK?”

“Sure,” Brent said. “Fifty-fifty.
But even if you ditch me and you find it on your own, it’s still fifty-fifty,
regardless of who finds it.”

“Why?” Winn said. “That doesn’t
sound very fair. If I found it on my own, it should be mine.”

“I’m the one who came up with the
idea to look for it,” Brent said, holding up the book. “You wouldn’t even know
about it if it weren’t for me. And you’re always trying to ditch me. It
wouldn’t be fair if you found it and didn’t split it with me.”

“Fine,” Winn said. He didn’t feel
like arguing with Brent, and he thought the chances of finding the gold were a
longshot at best. “Fifty-fifty, regardless of who finds it.”

“OK!” Brent said, smiling at him.
Winn smiled back, sealing the deal.