The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(37)
He came back two hours later with a rented metal detector. An eight pound maul and a mattock and shovel. He climbed down into the cellar and began to scan the floor. He got a number of readings and he blew away the dust and marked the floor with a black greasepencil. By evening he’d dug six holes in the floor, breaking up the sandy concrete and digging down through the clay. He found a large file, the head of a hammer, the blade of a plane. An antique iron gear. He found an iron casting with two machined faces that was marked Brown & Sharpe. No idea what it was.
He pitched the tools one at a time up out of the cellar and climbed up the shaky stairs with the metal detector and collected everything and put it in the trunk of the rental car and drove back to the motel and went to bed.
He’d intended to return the detector the next morning and try to get a flight out but he had a dream about his grandmother and it woke him and he lay staring at the shadow of the windowframe on the upper wall cast there by the groundlights in the shrubbery outside. After a while he got up and got a plastic cup off the dresser and still in his shorts he went out to the drink machines in the breezeway and got some ice and a can of orange juice and came back and sat on the bed in the dark.
She’d worked in the textile mills in Rhode Island as a child. She and her sister. They read to each other by candlelight at the end of those twelve-hour days in a room where you could see your breath. Whittier and Longfellow and Scott and later Milton and Shakespeare. She was thirty when she married and his father was her only child. The man she married was a chemist and an engineer and he held several patents in the vulcanization process of rubber and the basement was his home laboratory and workshop. It was a magic place and even as a child Western was given the run of it.
The dream was that his grandmother had called down the stairs to him where he sat at his grandfather’s workbench and he went to the stairs and she said: You were so quiet. I just wanted to know you were still there.
He ate breakfast in the motel coffeeshop and drove back out to the house. He checked the dial on the metal detector and then passed the plate back and forth over the concrete behind the stairs. Twenty minutes later he was squatting on his knees grubbing in the musty clay at the bottom of the hole he’d dug. What he lifted out was an eighteen inch length of heavy lead waterpipe.
He twisted away the dirt and the remains of the old sacking in which the pipe had been wrapped. It was about an inch and a half in diameter and stopped at either end with a female cap. The threads were sealed with white lead. You could see the rim of it around the edge, yellow with age. He stood up and carried it over to the wall and found a space in the stonework to jam the cap into and he tried to twist the pipe but the cap wouldnt move. He shook it. It felt completely solid.
There were sixteen of them in all. Buried in three holes in the floor. He stacked them against the wall and dug some more with the shovel but there was nothing else there. He ran the detector over a good bit of the space but he didnt pick up anything else. He’d lost all track of the time.
The pipes were a bit too heavy to throw up over the wall and he carried them one at a time up the ladder and down the driveway and piled them in front of the car. He left the maul and the shovel in the cellar and put the detector in the back seat of the car and opened the trunk lid and carried the pipes back and stacked them in the trunk. By the time he was done the rear of the car was visibly down on its springs.
When he got to the rental store it was closed and he drove back out to the hardware store and bought two sets of large visegrips and then drove back to the motel.
He backed the car as close to the door as he could get it and went in and laid the bag with the visegrips on the table and stretched out on the bed to wait for nightfall. He couldnt sleep and after a while he got up and got the visegrips and pried them off the display cards they were stapled to and put the cards and the bag in the trash and walked out to watch the darkness fall over Akron.
He carried the pipes in two at a time and stacked them just inside the door and then shut the trunk of the car and came back in and closed the door and locked it. He sat in the floor with the visegrips and backed off the jaws and fitted them to the caps at either end, adjusting the jaws with the knurled screw and clamping them shut at ninety degrees to each other. He laid the pipe on the carpet and stood on one visegrip and bent and took hold of the other with both hands and leaned into it. The pliers turned on the cap, raking up fresh metal bright under the teeth. He adjusted the jaws tighter and clamped them again and bore down on the pliers and this time the cap began slowly to turn. A coil of dried white lead spiraled up from the threads. He pushed the pliers to the floor and released the jaws with the toggle and clamped them again. A few turns and the cap felt pretty loose and he stood the pipe upright and turned the pliers by hand and lifted off the cap and laid the pliers in the floor and turned the pipe upside down and held it in both hands and shook it.
What tumbled out onto the carpet were about four double handfuls of US Mint double-eagle twenty dollar goldpieces bright as the day they were minted.
He sat there looking at them. He picked one up and turned it in his hand. He knew nothing about them. What they might be worth. If you could even sell them. He’d never heard of St-Gaudens. His strange saga as an artist. He stacked the coins like poker chips. There were two hundred of them. Thirty-two hundred in all? Face value sixty-four thousand dollars. They were worth what? Ten times that? He would find out that he wasnt even close.
He spent the next two hours turning the caps off the other lengths of pipe. When he was done the pipes and the caps were piled against the wall and there was what looked like at least half a washtubful of gold piled in the floor. He checked the dates and found none later than 1930 and he supposed that was the last year that any were buried. He scooped up a handful of the coins and hefted them and he looked at the pile. He thought that there must be well over a hundred pounds of gold piled up in the motel room floor. He got up and went to the closet and got down the extra blanket and spread it over the coins and went to bed.