Desert Treasure

The boy’s father loved to talk, but never to the boy and his mother. Conversations between the three of them were limited to pure necessity, if that. No, the boy’s father loved to talk over the phone. He spent most every night from five to ten or eleven or sometimes even midnight talking with what Mother bitterly called his “old war buddies”, though the boy’s father had never actually fought in a war. The boy did not understand what she really meant -- something along the lines of 'slimeball college friends' -- until it was too late.

The boy’s father liked to take these calls in the kitchen, shaking whiskey glass in hand, separated by a waist-high bar from the TV room where the boy spent his nights. Ostensibly, the boy spent the time watching kiddy programming on the TV. But he secretly eavesdropped on his father’s conversations with his old war buddies, yearning to learn more about the man who rarely deigned to speak to him.

They talked about a lot of things, though the boy seldom understood much at all. College hijinks, old friends, old camping trips out west, old loves. The boy didn’t have much interest in any of that. Still, he listened and waited, sure that one day he would hear something of substance, something life-changing. And one day, sure enough, he did.

His father was standing in the kitchen as always, tall and imposing and a little frightening, phone held to his ear, shaking slightly like the whiskey glass in his other hand. He had lowered his voice a little, something he always did when he didn’t want the boy to hear what he was saying.

So the boy missed the preceding lines, straining to hear the conversation over the prattling of the TV. But he caught the one that mattered.

His father paused – itself a rare action – before sighing deeply, impossibly long. Then, he said it: “I lost my treasure in the Mojave desert, in the shade of a stand of joshua trees.”

Treasure! Finally, something good! The boy was transformed. That conversation would shape the rest of his youth, and much of his early adulthood.

The boy quickly became known for his obsession with the treasure. He told everyone about it, except for his parents. His school assignments surrounded topics relevant to his search: illustrated maps of the Mojave desert, research papers on joshua trees, essays on exotic wars his father may have fought in, and biographies of various pirates, though he would eventually outgrow the latter subject for its obvious irrelevancy.

As he grew older he also began to research his father’s life, in secret. Where he lived, where he went on his camping trips, who he spent time with. He couldn't find anything about a war, but remained undeterred. By the time the boy went off to college, he had come close to pinpointing the location where he believed the treasure must be located based on the rarity of the usually-sparse stands of joshua trees substantial enough to provide shade.

The boy studied archaeology and became well known as the young man who failed to outgrow a juvenile obsession. His professors warned him away from the profession for his apparent addiction, assuring him that the field was not simply ‘treasure hunting.’ But the boy could see through the thin veneer of academia, could see the hunger in his professors’ eyes that contradicted their righteous claims.

He graduated within four years and quickly received a grant to lead his first expedition into the Mojave desert behind the aegis of unearthing Native American burial mounds. Contrary to the traditional disenchantment of growth, his imagination of the treasure that lay buried for him to find only became more fantastical as he grew older. He imagined glittering caches of golden doubloons, patina-frosted cups, silver plates encrusted with jewels, elegantly engraved daggers with jagged blades and jade handles. By the time his students began planting their shovels in the sand in the rare shade of a stand of joshua trees, he could imagine all the riches of the world, and perhaps even more.

He stood behind them as they worked, watching silently, trying to imagine his father there through the folds of time. What had he buried? Why had he buried it? How had he come by goods of such splendor? Something to do with a war across the ocean? Why would he bury his loot here? A dry wind picked up before him, blowing in the scents of white fir and juniper from higher plains, and he wondered if his father had smelled that, too. He thought back to the comment his father had made, the comment that had set his life on its magnificent course. “I lost my treasure in the Mojave desert, in the shade of a stand of joshua trees.” 

Had he meant for him to find it?

The sun had just melted into the sand when a student caught the young man’s attention. The other students gathered around excitedly as she handed him what looked to be a small rusted locket. 

The young man took it without a word. He turned around and held it close, searching. A locket, for sure. Not bronze, not silver, not gold. Not composed of anything precious at all. He turned his head and instructed his students to keep digging, sure that there must be something more just below.

He pried the locket open with some difficulty as the students resumed plunging their shovels into the hardening sand where they would find nothing else but some old rodent bones and petrified wood. Inside was a picture of two faces pressed close: a woman he didn’t recognize and, clear as day, a younger version of his father.

The young man turned back to the place where his father and this woman had stood, where this woman had ripped the locket from her chest and thrown it into the sand, where she had stormed away as his father stood back, watching silently. Always silent. He could see it all, and understood then the childhood double-speak of war, and of treasure, which in this case must have meant her, must have meant affair.

He instructed his students to stop digging and to pack up their tools before quickly turning away again to hide his face in the darkening shade of the joshua trees.