This time the word TREASURE was machine-stenciled on the box’s sides, in large letters, along with the name of a leading British toy manufacturer and the two words “Spanish Main,” in Old English type.
“They tried to market it over here, but it stiffed early,” he explained, opening the seal on the box with his thumbnail. “Levinsky made a killing in Baltimore on a misdelivered shipment of game pieces.”
I watched his face for any sign that he was toying with me, but there was none; he seemed to want only to show me, with a hint of desperation, what was inside the crate, as though the hardest part of it for him had been having no one in whom to confide the secrets of his fabulous vault. He lifted the flaps to reveal a king’s ransom, a cool million, in cardboard doubloons, painted gold and dimly glittering in the basement light, and I wondered if this was what had been in the box I’d buried in Mrs. Colodny’s yard, or if it had been some other treasure entirely. I knew little about the subject, but I hoped that once you had buried a treasure you did not have to keep reburying it again and again.
“It’s supposedly real gold dust in the paint,” Harry said. “That was the gimmick, I guess.”
He handed me a thick coin, and I examined it. It bore an illegible mock inscription and a crude cartoon of an emperor’s head, and as I fingered it some of its luster came away on my hands. Harry was looking right at me now with a fevered smile, and once more I didn’t know what to say, but there was no one else there, and I had to say something.
“We’re rich,” I said.
Part II: The Lost World
The Little Knife
ONE SATURDAY IN THAT last, interminable summer before his parents separated and the Washington Senators baseball team was expunged forever from the face of the earth, the Shapiros went to Nags Head, North Carolina, where Nathan, without planning to, perpetrated a great hoax. They drove down I-95, through the Commonwealth of Virginia, to a place called the Sandpiper — a ragged, charming oval of motel cottages painted white and green as the Atlantic, and managed by a kind, astonishingly fat old man named Colonel Larue, who smoked cherry cigars and would, if asked, play catch or keep-away. Outside his office, in the weedy gravel, stood an old red-and-radium-white Coke machine, which dispensed bottles from a vertical glass door that sighed when you opened it, and which reminded Nathan of the Automat his grandmother had taken him to once in New York City. The sight of the faded machine and of the whole Sandpiper — like that of the Automat — filled Nathan with a happy sadness, or, really, a sad happiness; he was not too young, at ten, to have developed a sense of nostalgia.
There were children in every cottage — with all manner of floats, pails, paddles, trucks, and flying objects — and his younger brother Ricky, to Nathan’s envy, immediately fell in with a gang of piratical little boys with water pistols, who were always reproducing fart sounds and giggling chaotically when their mothers employed certain ordinary words such as “hot dog” and “rubber.” The Shapiros went to the ocean every summer, and at the beginning of this trip, as on all those that had preceded it, Nathan and his brother got along better than they usually did, their mother broke out almost immediately in a feathery red heat rash, and their father lay pale and motionless in the sun, like a monument, and always forgot to take off his wristwatch when he went into the sea. Nathan had brought a stack of James Bond books and his colored pencils; there were board games — he and his father were in the middle of their Strat-O-Matic baseball playoffs — and miniature boxes of cereal; the family ate out every single night. But when they were halfway through the slow, dazzling week — which was as far as they were to get — Nathan began to experience an unfamiliar longing: He wanted to go home.
He awoke very early on Wednesday morning, went into the cottage’s small kitchen, where the floor was sticky and the table rocked and trembled, and chose the last of the desirable cereals from the Variety pack, leaving for Ricky only those papery, sour brands with the scientific names — the sort that their grandparents liked. As he began to eat, Nathan heard, from the big bedroom down the hall, the unmistakable, increasingly familiar sound of his father burying his mother under a heap of scorn and ridicule. It was, oddly, a soft and pleading sound. Lately, the conversation and actions of Dr. Shapiro’s family seemed to disappoint him terribly. His left hand was always flying up to smack his sad and outraged forehead, so hard that Nathan often thought he could hear his father’s wedding ring crack against his skull. When they’d played their baseball game the day before — Nathan’s Baltimore Bonfires against his father’s Brooklyn Eagles — every decision Nathan made led to a disaster, and his father pointed out each unwise substitution and foolish attempt to steal in this new tone of miserable sarcasm, so that Nathan had spent the afternoon apologizing, and, finally, crying. Now he listened for his mother’s voice, for the note of chastened shame.
The bedroom door slammed, and Mrs. Shapiro came out into the kitchen. She was in her bathrobe, a wild, sleepless smile on her face.
“Good morning, honey,” she said, then hummed to herself as she boiled water and made a cup of instant coffee. Her spoon tinkled gaily against the cup.
“Where are you going, Mom?” said Nathan. She had taken up her coffee and was heading for the sliding glass door that led out of the kitchen and down to the beach.
“See you, honey,” she sang.
“Mom!” said Nathan. He stood up — afraid, absurdly, that she might be leaving for good, because she seemed so happy. After a few seconds he heard her whistling, and he went to the door and pressed his face against the wire screen. His mother had a Disney whistle, melodious and full, like a Scotsman’s as he walks across a meadow in a brilliant kilt. She paced briskly along the ramshackle slat-and-wire fence, back and forth through the beach grass, drinking from the huge white mug of coffee and whistling heartily into the breeze; her red hair rose from her head and trailed like a defiant banner. He watched her observe the sunrise — it was going to be a perfect, breezy day — then continued to watch as she set her coffee on the ground, removed her bathrobe, and, in her bathing suit, began to engage in a long series of yoga exercises — a new fad of hers — as though she were playing statues all alone. Nathan was soon lost, with the fervor of a young scientist, in contemplation of his pretty, whistling mother rolling around on the ground.
“Oh, how can she?” said Dr. Shapiro.
“Yes,” said Nathan, gravely, before he blushed and whirled around to find his father, in pajamas, staring out at Mrs. Shapiro. His smile was angry and clenched, but in his eyes was the same look of bleak surprise, of betrayal, that had been there when Nathan took out Johnny Sain, a slugging pitcher, and the pinch-hitter, Enos Slaughter, immediately went down on strikes. There were a hundred new things that interested Nathan’s mother — bonsai, the Zuni, yoga, real estate — and although Dr. Shapiro had always been a liberal, generous, encouraging man (as Nathan had heard his mother say to a friend), and had at first happily helped her to purchase the necessary manuals, supplies, and coffee-table books, lately each new fad seemed to come as a blow to him — a going astray, a false step.
“How can she?” he said again, shaking his big bearded head.
“She says it’s really good for you,” said Nathan.
His father smiled down on his son ruefully, and tapped him once on the head. Then he turned and went to the refrigerator, hitching up his pajama bottoms. They were the ones patterned with a blue stripe and red chevrons — the ones that Nathan always imagined were the sort worn by the awkward, doomed elephant in the Groucho Marx joke.