Staying Away From People

Staying Away From People

         by Ba Ba Reemer the Redeemer  

Once when Johnny and Frank went to Kenora to purchase supplies they almost gave away their secret by accident more than stupidity. The stupid happens, we all of us humans know that. Take for instance my advice many years ago to my sister when she wanted my sage opinion, which at the time was not to marry the man whom she ended up marrying. Accidents happen too, we miscreants are more than fully aware. When my Pentecostal aunt Diane drove to Pensacola in 1963 to attend a conference on the religious right in America, actually intending to again meet and finally consummate an affair that had been brewing between herself and a Southern Baptist youth pastor (incidentally black and whom she had met and admired at an international church picnic two years earlier), on the first and only time she got into bed naked with him, the hotel attendant who brought them Champagne room service as they lay there under the covers was none other than her nephew from two streets over back home, new to his job of three weeks. 

       Johnny and Frank met with similar bad luck on June 27, 1984. They were shopping in a mines and minerals commercial only outlet on Frank Street near the waterfront for a Geiger counter. Why on earth, you might ask, would they have been interested in one of these devices meant to find metals when they had already discovered their gold, and a whole ton of it too. The answer is simple and a little embarrassing but, since we have been talking about human nature, not at all surprising. They soon became aware that the gold in the vein that had become exposed because of the dynamite blast that they had set off for the express purpose of getting at the said vein, had displaced the amount of gold that would have run through the six by eight foot hole that the explosion had caused. They wish to retrieve it. They wished not to lose a single penworth of the precious metal, and for that reason had come to town to purchase a metal detector in order to scour the surrounding forest near the load hole to find any and all pieces of the yellow material scattered about. It was pure and simple avarice that drove them to be so nitpicky. They might have been satisfied with the six inch wide vein of gold that showed itself so brilliantly disappearing into the pink granite and that surely represented enough wealth to do them and their offspring into the distance historical future. But no. They would have the gold out of hiding. And they did. And they almost gave away their secret. This is how it happened.

         Benjamin Gay sold items in the mines and minerals store. He handed down a geiger counter from the top shelf and Johnny took it and handled it and passed it about the room before various objects of metal, enjoying the singing of the notes that crescendoed as it homed in near steel or chrome or aluminum or brass.  

         "Hey eh eh eh eh eh eh hey!" Frank brayed his pleasure with each approach Johnny made to another new item of metal in the store. They were careful not to go near their backpack with its twenty pounds of gold chunks. They carried that pack sack with them in case the solution should come to them how to successfully trade it in for money without getting all the world flying after them in search of their lode. 

       "We'll take it," Johnny said suddenly.

        "Yeah!" Frank agreed, and they handed it back to Mr. Gay who took it from them with a frown still on his face and began to ring it up. He lifted it and sighted along it stupidly and deliberately tapped one end of it against Frank's head. Frank let him know what he thought of him and Ben turned on the Geiger counter and passed it back and forth over Frank's head to determine if it contained deposits of iron. It did. Or so it appeared. It began singing very loudly and very much more loudly than it had heretofore at the presence of any of the metals the two prospectors had tested it on.

         "Hey!" Frank said, warning the proprietor to back off. But in the heat of the oddity of Frank having a metal head, Benjamin passed the machine over the knapsack and the source of the burst of song became clear. The detector went mad. Frank leapt back and Johnny stepped in front of his partner to intercept Benjamin's forward movement.

        "You've got something in your pack!" Mr. Gay shouted. "You must have gold or something in there!" He stopped and looked accusingly at the two.

         "No, you moron!" Frank sang out. "Are you stupid? We are going to look for coins on the beach. We haven't got any gold here. Geez you're an idiot!" With that they paid the bewildered scorekeeper and got out of there as fast as they could. Over a beer they agreed that they had to stop carrying the pack around. They could not afford another accident like this one. Other events over the years also nearly cost them their privacy and in consequence their lives, but twenty years later they were still digging out gold and hiding it here and there in places they carefully noted in a book that they had for the special purpose of tracking these hiding places.

          Lambing about town now and then cost them each time a great deal of stress. They came eventually to the conclusion that Kenora must be out of bounds. It was there that most of their missteps seemed to have been taken. Stay away from large centers they began to say with certainty of knowledge. Stick to the forest, unless there is a great need to go into town, and then just to Sioux Narrows or to Fudge Creek. So it became a way of life for Johnny and Frank to dig and hide gold but to keep away from people.