The End of FUN (45 page)

I wondered holy down the hallway on my crutches, looking at the wheelchairs and posters and fake plants and thinking how wonderful it all was. Just touching every little thing with my eyes.
This
is holy;
that
is holy. The receptionist (who was holy) gave me a pad and pen (that were holy) and I filled out the intake paperwork (holy)—
name, birthdate, address, holy, holy, holy
, and when I got to the part that said
OCCUPATION
I paused for a moment, and then I wrote THE LAST COWBOY, just like that, all in caps.

I wanted to keep it going, the holy feeling of wonder, but it had already started to fade a little as we headed back to my grandpa's house. Other things began entering my mind. Like what about the property? And what about Oso? Where had he gone? Was he OK?

When we got to the ridge, Isaac and Sam weren't there anymore. A police officer had taken their place.

“I'll tell you what I told the guys with the horses,” he said. “Although the road is officially open again, the fire is not one hundred percent contained. Do not cross any police lines. Otherwise, you're free to go and see what's left.”

See what's left
.

Evie and I didn't speak as we headed down the road. The plume of smoke was gone, but the air was hazy and smelled like campfire, and as we climbed the last gentle rise I clutched my seat. In the distance, a wide black scar blanketed the hills where the golf course had been. So what next? What about Anne's place? What about my grandpa's? The entire inheritance burned to a crisp? I kept thinking about the tree. That gnarly Russian olive.

I saw the corral, and Anne's little modular—and as we dipped down again I saw my grandpa's property, and the tree was still there.

The truck was still there.

The house was still there.

It was all still there.

And I was like, “Holy shit, OK,” and Evie was like, “No kidding.”

A fireman waved us over to the side of the road. He had pretty much the biggest beard I'd ever seen.

“You the couple that lives here? Good job on your firebreak. We're always trying to get people to understand the importance of preventative measures. We live in the desert, for God's sake. You thought ahead, and today you were one of the lucky ones. Today that thinking saved your house.”

It was true. You could see where the fire had ended. The blackened earth came right up to the edge of Anne's property, where I'd stopped the weedwacking. A couple guys with shovels were there putting out the hot spots.

Later, after everyone had gone, Homie
™
popped up.

“Hey, bro. How goes it? Sorry I didn't come back. I was trying to put out the fire!”

“Yeah, that was something, wasn't it?”

“You're OK, then?” said Oso.

“Yeah, I'm OK.”

“And your grandpa's place?”

“Yeah, it's fine.”

“Awesome. So have you checked the hole?”

Funny, but in the excitement of the day I'd completely forgotten about the hole.

I looked across the brush at the mounds of dirt. All that earth scooped out of the hollow. The tree branches hanging over it like an open umbrella. Right. Yes. The
hole
.

I crutched out to the tree. Oso sure had moved a lot of earth. A couple of the mounds were almost up to my chest. As for the hole, I couldn't even see the bottom of it—just a shadow pooling in the evening light. I looked into the darkness, and the darkness looked into me, and it was just like that for a while.

I got on my knees and dug my hands into the side of the tallest mound. Roots. Rocks. Dirt clods that burst into powder when I squeezed them.
Holy
, I reminded myself.

The feeling was fading fast with the evening light, but I tried to hold on to it. I found another spoon (holy?), then a whisk (holy?). I crawled from mound to mound, sifting through the earth, setting aside kitchen implements as I went, trying to remind myself of the light and holiness. And at the base of a smaller mound I found another fork, one last piece of cutlery.

So this was it. I held it up in the dying light. Oh, holy fork.

It's the thought that counts, right? If nothing else, he'd led me on an adventure. And it hadn't been
all
bad—parts of it had been pretty good. If it weren't for my grandpa, I wouldn't have met Katie. And now she was gone. So OK. It can't be true that every single Irish folk hero—after he or she has solved the impossible riddles and completed the harrowing journey—is successful in the end, can it? I put the fork in my pocket—one last memento—and crawled back to where I'd left my crutches.

And that's when I saw it.

Near the bottom of the slope of one of the dirt mounds, there was an odd protrusion. Something kind of block shaped. I crawled to it and swept the earth away. Some kind of a box. A metal box. A lockbox—with, yeah, a lock on it. Your standard Master
®
Combination lock (YAY!) with double-reinforced construction and rust-resistant casing.

So here it was. And yet there was one more clue I'd missed.
The will is the key
, he'd said, but that made no sense to me now, because I didn't need a
key
, I needed a
combination
. What was the combination? It didn't matter. Master
®
locks are tempered and reinforced and rust-resistant or whatever, but there's more than one way to crack an egg. I grabbed a rock, a big sturdy rock, and instead of going at the lock, I went at the hinges of the lockbox. I whanged it with the rock and whanged it with the rock, and eventually the hinges began to bend and break.

Before I pried off the lid, I had this moment of reflection. Because here we were, after all this time, finally at the end. And whatever was inside, money or gold or another fork, I decided I was going to share it.

And as I pulled back the lid I was reminded of those movies where the drug dealer lifts the briefcase lid and the camera zooms in on all those tidy piles of cash.

And—
holy shit
. There they were. Only these piles weren't tidy, they were more like bundles: cinched in the middle with rubber bands, bills fanning out on either end like a paper bouquet. Money! Pure, unadulterated cash! For a moment I just sat there and looked at it, all those piles of money. After all this time.

I took a bundle and slipped off the rubber band, fanning the money out in my lap.

Homie
™
popped up.

“I found the treasure.”

It was true. I flipped through the stack and Homie
™
tabulated the total. Then I flipped through another stack and it tabulated that, too, quicker than the eye can see. Oh, wonders of modern technology. It was a good feeling, the two of us working together again like old friends. After a dozen or so bundles I asked Homie
™
how much money we were looking at so far.

“Zero? Whaddya mean, zero?”

“You're glitching again. I'm gonna have to count it myself.” I started counting a stack…twenty, forty, sixty, eighty…but then a dark thought wormed its way into my brain.

“Hey, how much did you say this is worth?”

“Zero what?”

“OK. But how many
dollars
are there so far?”

“So what's that worth in amero?”

“Zero?”

“What?”

“It's
expired
?”

“So this is worth…”

As the money fell from my hands I heard a voice whisper inside me, and what it said was:
Holy
. And another voice, a little less soft, whispered back:
Screw that
. I knelt there, swaying back and forth between the two ideas, all nauseated, like being on the world's worst seesaw. I started to puke but ended up just spitting instead. Nothing would come up. I was empty inside. I grabbed a bill. $100, it said. One zero zero.

So that was a bummer, and I knew the next thing I had to do was tell my dad and sister. But I couldn't. Not right away anyway. I waited a couple weeks until the night of the JC Wonder Excursion's North American tour concert launch party, held in Dad's backyard. His band was going on an actual tour, four gigs spanning parts of northern Nevada and central Idaho, culminating at a VFW hall in Boise, where they'd be opening for the Christcore band This Bloody Cross.

I was actually kind of proud of him. He was finally making his dream a reality, even if it wasn't quite what he always wanted. I just wished I had some spending cash to give him for his journey.

The truth about the money had pretty much taken the shine off my revelation of the holy wonder of it all, but even so, and even though a couple weeks had passed, maybe there was a little residual bliss, because I wasn't as bummed out as I could have been. Just kind of like dazed. I showed up for the party with my grandfather's busted lockbox under my arm. The band had already started.

Here's the thing about my dad: he knows how to keep a beat. He's not the flashiest drummer, but he's always got the kick going. And the guitarist could play guitar, and the bassist knew what he was doing, too. You would expect it to be so. They had like over a century of practice between them. What I'm saying is, the JC Wonder Excursion wasn't half bad.