My Father's Last Floppy Disk & Testament

Merv does the finger thing and mouths "right friggin' now" again. He's wearing a camouflaged suit to my father's funeral, and it's not helping him blend in.

I'm at the head of a line of well-wishers and condolence-givers, mostly little old ladies dressed in black, so I ignore him.

"Psst!"

The line of old ladies turns to stare at Merv.

"Ahpsst!" He tries to pass his earlier psst off as a sneeze then strolls too casually out of the reception room.

"Merv has something to tell you, dear," says my mom, standing beside me.

"Do I have to?" I mutter.

My mom, still bright-eyed at 74, gives me the look, the one that says "I'll keep smiling no matter what you do, but my heart will quietly break if you don't do the right thing."

So, her smile sends me away, off along the trail of ever-furtive Merv.

He's waiting in the corridor and doesn't make eye contact as he pivots and walks into the men's bathroom. I sigh and follow.

Inside the men's room, he's sweeping the stalls to make sure we're alone.

"Come on, quick, choose a stall. Middle one is pissah."

I stare at Merv, my dad's best friend since before I was born, this ancient Bostonian who found his way to southern Utah ages ago yet somehow never lost his accent.

Then, I walk into the middle stall.

The aged bulldog of man follows me in and latches the stall door closed, boxing me in with his trademark scent of stale pickles and Aqua Velva.

"Now, stand on the toilet."

"I'm not going to do that."

"Ha! Spycraft 101, my friend." Merv steps up on the toilet seat and sits on the tank to hide his shoes in case roving gangs of CIA agents have already infiltrated Hillam and Sons funeral home.

"Thanks for being here. For the funeral," I say, just to have something to say.

Merv opens then closes his mouth. His face crumples for an instant, then he's back to glaring while fumbling inside his camouflage suit for something. He pulls out a large Ziploc bag and thrusts it at me.

"This is the big one, the friggin' big one, kid! Big K said so."

I take the proffered bag. There's a black square inside. When enough of my neurons line up along memory lane, I realize it's a floppy disk. Someone has written something in red sharpie across its label: To "Lindsey."

I recognize my father's deceptively neat hand. Well, at least he used my preferred name, even if he felt the need to put it in quotes.

"Neat?" I venture when I notice that Merv's watching me, waiting for my reaction.

"No, not neat. That flahppy is life or death, kid." Still perched on the toilet like some kind of bathroom gnome, he rubs a hand through his white buzz cut then pinches the bridge of his nose like I'm giving him a migraine.

"Okay. Thanks, Merv." I unlatch the bathroom stall.

"Beep me, and I'll be thah day or night."

"Do what?"

"Page me once you got a plan, doofus."

"What?"

"Don't get smaht with me. Call my beepah." He points to a little black box on his belt. "It tells me when you called. My numbah's on the cahd."

Before tucking the floppy disk bag in my suit side pocket, I see there's also a yellowed card in there.

Our secret meeting's cut short by the sound of someone entering the bathroom. Merv's eyes go wide behind the safety shooting glasses he always wears. He flushes the toilet, shoos me out of the stall, then quietly re-latches it from the inside.

I'd say that was weird, but it doesn't even make the top 20 for Merv and my dad, amateur treasure hunters and seasoned conspiracy theorists both, two old men who never grew out of playing make-believe.

"Hey!"

I turn and see a man wearing all denim and standing next to the urinals.

"Aren't you going to wash your hands?" he asks.

"Sure, thanks," I mumble and walk to the nearest sink.

The man stations himself at the faucet next to mine and stares at me in the mirror. I see he's wearing an eye patch, and on that eye patch is a wolf who's also wearing an eye patch.

"Oh boy, oh man, big things are a-coming." The one-eyed man in denim draws back his head and howls at the ceiling like a cartoon wolf would at a full moon.

Okay, that was weird.

I don't dry my hands so I can leave the bathroom sooner and get back to accepting the finality of my father's death.

***

After Kevin Sr. aka Big K aka my dad is buried, I, Kevin Jr., better known as Lindsey, am faced with the locked door of his study, otherwise called the basement.

My mom has brought me here, after my wife and 3-year-old son have settled down for the night.

"You want to stick around, see what the big deal is this time?" I ask.

"No, he said for your eyes only."

"So, where's the key?"

My mom tucks her chin down and spreads out her arms, which means she's doing an impression of my dad. "The answer shall be upon you," she booms.

I hug her when I see the tears in her eyes, then she pushes me toward the basement door and I'm left to figure it out on my own.

After about an hour of quietly searching under sofa cushions and through kitchen cabinets, I'm back before the locked study with zilch to show for it.

The answer shall be upon me? My shoe through the door? How would he know what I'd have on me?

Oh… I take out the bag that Merv gave me. There's a bulge under the floppy disk's label. I peel off the label to reveal the key. Dad always did have a knack for making me feel foolish.

The opening study door bumps into something, and that something is off and away down the stairs before I can stop it. My dad was considerate enough to leave the basement lights on, so I can see it's his 13-pound bowling ball that I've set into motion.

I close the door behind me and cringe as the 13-pounder thumps down the last few stairs, hoping the noise doesn't wake up my sleeping son.

Past the stairs, the ball barrels into a tower of wooden blocks, which topples and somehow sets off my dad's model train set. The tiny train whistles mercilessly, set on a collision course with a domino positioned like a maiden in distress across its tracks. The domino falls and sets off hundreds more scattered across the basement floor until they come to a sudden stop even though there are more still lined up. I go over to investigate.

An unusually large, very dead roach wedged between two dominoes has foiled my dad's postmortem Rube Goldberg machine.

The remaining dominoes lead to a mouse trap. Not wanting to insult a dead man's last effort, I give them a little push. The mouse trap snaps shut then flips over because it's tied to the ceiling fan's pull chain.

The chain gives a little jerk, but the fan fails to turn on, a fitting tribute to a man with a penchant for following intricate paths that all led nowhere.

I laugh to keep from crying then give the chain a pull and wait for the next clue. The fan picks up speed, and I see slight movement on the far wall. It's my dad's Ernest Goes to Jail poster, a movie that was the height of comedic genius for him.

With the fan running, the poster ripples inward. I pull Ernest off the wall and find a makeshift cubbyhole, cut-out dry wall lined with tinfoil.

And set inside this makeshift hidey-hole is a plastic brick of a computer monitor and equally bulky tower. The brand name proudly displayed on both reads "Compaq Presario" without a trace of irony.

I check for booby traps then press the tower's power button because I see a power cord extending through a hole in the inner wall's tinfoil. A blinking green cursor appears. After about 30 seconds, the green cursor moves down a line and the Compaq Presario beeps cheerfully to inform me of its progress.

After an eternity or perhaps a minute, the screen turns blue and Windows 95 announces itself with the synthesized sounds of heaven.

I insert Dad's floppy disk. Steeling myself for what I might find, I give the arthritic mouse a double-click to open the floppy's single text file saved as "Untitled" in Notepad.

Surprisingly, it's not some cryptic anti-government manifesto. I think my dad meant it to be a poem even though Notepad opens it as a single line of text. I hit Enter as I read his rhymes:

Dear son, now that I'm six feet below

there's a place I need you to go.

It's where the wind blows just right

and the stars come out at night.

You head 80 paces north of Broken Dog rock

at mid morn when it's covered by Devil's Cock.

You'll see a passage known to no living man.

Follow it with fire in your belly if you can.

But watch out for the one-eyed wolf on your trail

because oh boy, oh man, he wants you to fail.

This is the big one

and I'm giving it to you son.

P.S. Burn this message and take Merv with you

To "burn the message," I drag the untitled text file to the desktop's Recycle Bin then empty that.

Windows 95 gives a triumphant double blast that sounds like a medieval trumpet when I shut down the Compaq.

I put the Ernest Goes to Jail poster back on the wall to cover up my dad's folly. On the poster, Ernest has tunneled into prison and all he has to show for it is a sheepish grin.

I stare at Ernest's bared teeth with existential dread because… my dead dad is trying to send me on one last treasure hunt.

I stopped going on those with him and Merv when I was in high school. It was all tall tales and me carrying their metal detector in the searing Utah sun while they talked about Anasazi diamonds that the metal detector wouldn't be able to detect anyway. By the time I was 14, I could see through their bullshit.

But my dad was always stubborn, stubborn enough to not see a doctor while quietly dying of prostate cancer, stubborn enough to engineer this bizarre final request from beyond the grave instead of a simple note, a simple note that I could then refuse because I can be stubborn too, stubborn enough to go by my middle name Lindsey rather than share the name Kevin with him.

So, I'm sorry Dad, but I'm just not going.

At least that's what I tell myself as I take out my cellphone and call Merv's beeper. There's nothing but, well, beeps on the other end. I don't know what to do from there, so I just hit 1 then #.

A phone rings, but it's the house's landline instead of mine. I scramble up the stairs before it can wake—too late, I hear my son cry and my wife groan.

"You blowing up my beepah?" Merv asks when I pick up

"Yeah, listen, it's about the floppy—"

"Not ovah the phone. I'll be right thah."

He hangs up before I can protest.

Everyone—my bright-eyed mom, my bleary-eyed wife, and my sniffling son—is in the kitchen when Merv arrives.

He pulls up in a brown Camaro held together by rust, the car that my dad and Merv traded back and forth like a poker chip.

Merv, ever bashful around women, stares at the kitchen floor and nods when my mom offers him coffee in the dead of night. Then, he steers me to a corner of the kitchen away from the others.

"Big K give you the cawahdinates?" he asks.

"No coordinates, just something about Broken Dog and… Devil's Cock," I mumble.

"Ayuh, Devil's Cawk! I can take you right thah."

My 3-year-old screams with laughter, while Merv looks up, bewildered, then leans back in conspiratorially.

"Let's grab cawfee and go."

"Right now?"

"It's the friggin' big one, kid. You don't wait."

My excuses fall down like dominoes. I don't have the clothes for it, but my mom bustles upstairs and grabs some of my dad's clothes for me. I wait for Kevin the III to throw a tantrum at my imminent departure, but he's more fascinated by the beeper that Merv gives him for safekeeping. And my wife just tells me I look cute in my camping vest.

Damn, I'm in it.

Merv pops the rusted brown Camaro into first and we squeal out of the driveway. The Camaro has no AC, so we keep the windows down and I shout parts of my dad's message into Merv's hairy ear. He pops the clutch into fifth when he hears that part about "mid morn."

Apparently, we're heading to a part of Escalante where both the Broken Dog and Devil's Cock reside. Utah's Escalante, an unfathomable rockscape warped by weather, water, and time; the last place to be mapped in the country; and the real El Dorado, according to my dad.

The hum of the engine and the wind in my ears merge together and reach a low pitch. They drone on like my dad, the voice of Big K speculating about Anasazi, aliens, and the American West.

Merv honking on the horn like there's no tomorrow wakes me. He's swerving, and a large motorcycle is also swerving on the road in front of us, blocking both lanes.

Merv goes staccato on the horn and pulls into the left lane. The motorcycle drops back in the right lane, keeping pace with the Camaro on my side.

The driver turns toward me. It's the one-eyed man in denim from the funeral home bathroom, the man with the eye patch of the one-eyed wolf. He howls while revving his motorcycle, then speeds ahead, leaving us in his dust.

That's when it hits me, that part of my dad's note that I dismissed as nonsense: The one who wants me to fail, the one-eyed wolf on my trail, except now he's ahead of us.

I spit it out for Merv to hear.

"That wasn't you howling in the bathroom?" he asks.

"Why would I do that?"

"I dunno. Grief?"

"What are we going to do about him?"

"I got my atlatl."

"Your what?"

"Come on, kid, you remembah. My speah-chuckah. Backseat."

I lean back and see it on the floor behind our seats: A short piece of wood that looks like a cross between a pipe and an incense holder. Beside it is one giant arrow. I vaguely remember it, a gimmicky toy that Merv always talked up when I was a kid.

"That thing will take out an 18-wheelah, you aim it just right," present-day Merv says.

"Neat," I say and get a glare in return.

We pull off onto a bumpy gravel road. Then, after only a few minutes, we sputter to a stop.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

"Nada. We're here."

Sure enough, right next to the gravel road, there's a split rock formation. One side is more oblong and has three protrusions—front leg, back leg, tail. There's a gap about 20 feet wide, then the other side, more rounded and sandwiched between two ear-shaped boulders.

It's the Broken Dog staring me in the face.

And past it is an impossible stone column topped by a wicked, horned rock: Devil's Cock.

It must be mid morn because the Cock's shadow is directly over the Dog's gap.

The roar of a motorcycle breaks my reverie. The rider appears on the gravel road. He pulls up closer, and I see he's wearing some kind of wolf's head now.

"Bettah run your ass off, kid. Maybe I can take him out with the cah."

I'm about to sprint the 80 paces along the path of shadow when I remember the part of my dad's poem about having "fire in my belly."

I reach for the atlatl while Merv reaches for me, but I'm already out of the car.

The man in denim charges forward on his metal steed.

Come on, you one-eyed wolf son of a bitch. If Merv's spear-chucker can take out a truck, then surely it can take out one motorcycle.

I aim for the bike's front tire then fling the prehistoric weapon with all my might.

The giant arrow disappears, then reappears when it sprouts anew from the wolf's head… my aim was high.

The motorcycle skids to a stop, then the rider, giant arrow still protruding from his canine brow, dismounts and walks toward us.

Yeah, now would be the time to run.

"Ow, what the hell, Merv?"

The human voice stops me. The man in denim pulls off the wolf's head and stares at the projectile that narrowly missed his skull, then he pulls off the eye patch. He still has both eyes.

Merv is wheezing and choking in the driver's seat. Heart attack? I rush over before remembering that's just how he laughs.

"Sorry Sal, we'll get it sahted," he calls, then looks at me. "Big K wanted thah to be some dangah… and what the hell are you doing just standin' thah? Go find it. Run your ass off."

So I do.

I don't know what I'll find, but it'll be in a place where the wind blows just right and the stars come out at night.

He wanted me to see it at least once, I suppose.

Thank you Dad. Because Merv is right. This is it. The friggin' big one.