Harry (standard:adventure, 3381 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Jul 28 2007	Views/Reads: 3305/2201	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Harry and I found plenty of gold in the foothills of Colombia. The challenge was in staying alive to enjoy it!

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

when we were shacked up in the same whorehouse, I got to know about 
him. 

He manipulated by command. 

"Put yer tootsie right ...... there!, honey". 

He manipulated by deception. 

"C'mere, kid," he always called a lady 'kid', "C'mere and tell me which
of these pretty stones is the diamond, huh?  Which one?"  No matter 
which hand she chose, it was empty. 

And he manipulated by omission. 

"Look, it's a yellow metal." he'd say, fondling her gold locket. 

"Of course!  It's fourteen carat gold." 

"Yeah, kid, only this ain't gold." 

"What is it, then?  Tin?" 

Harry would bite hard into the locket.  "It's too hard for that," he
would grin, dropping it.  "Just cheap brass." 

"Geez!" she'd say, "That two-timing bastard who pawned it on me...." 

"Right you are, kid. Gimme a kiss. I'll take it and replace it with a
real gold one -- make it worth your while." 

Naturally, he never did. His collection of gold bric-a-brac was awesome.


Harry was short. pudgy in the butt and heavy in the belly.  He never
walked: he trundled.  Once, when he put on a dumpy old sailor hat, he 
resembled a character from a Thomas Pyncheon novel.  Harry would surely 
be a finalist in the "Mr. 5 by 5" contest.  He was really big. 

I couldn't smell gold, like Harry. But I could taste it. Gold was spicy,
excited my appetite, tingled my tongue, pursed up my gums, triggered 
off my digestion.  I could sure taste it.  For three years, I worked at 
an assay house, where I learned to detect false gold by tasting it.  A 
dentist once set a gold filling in my tooth, but I had him take it out 
again: the taste of garlic peppers was killing me.  One of its 
impurities must have been metallic tellurium. 

Also, I could hear gold singing.  In my lifetime, I've met only two
other people who could make a claim to this.  Harry wasn't one of them. 


It's not easy to explain, but when you've got this talent, the world is
full of music.  One of my high school professors made a little bell out 
of titanium alloy, and when he struck it, the chime just went on and on 
-- it never seemed to die out completely.  Another little bell, made 
from silver, sounded like tinfoil whistling in the wind.  But the gold 
made music on its own: its faint melody rose and fell like the song of 
the Rhine maidens.  Sometimes I could hear it half a mile away.  A 
gentle, enticing sound that ricocheted around my entrails until I 
nearly went sex-crazy.  The music was more than skin deep. No matter 
how bad things got, my feelings would harmonize with the gold-song and 
I felt better.  But I never wore any of the metal -- no rings, no pins, 
no collar-studs.  No gold at all.  It was the only way I could get some 
sleep. 

So, as I said, before we found the cave, we came across this little
stream full of nuggets and I could hear the gold singing.  Harry could 
smell the gold and I could taste it.  We picked a particularly rich 
spot and dug for it.  And the nuggets came tumbling out of the rock. 

The gold streak, narrow, soft and rich, wasn't far from the cave.  Harry
needed no tools. He just dug into the ground with his fingernails until 
the gold-bearing quartz crystals fell into his hands. Then he leaped 
up, laughing and screaming like a maniac.  Echoes ricocheted from the 
surrounding canyon walls.  That must have been Harry's happiest moment. 


I decided to bury him in the gold seam that made him so happy. 

*  *  * 

Before all this happened, Harry and I were over in the foothills of the
lower Cauca valley, the gold-lode of Colombia; we decided to do a 
little prospecting.  What with one thing or another, you never know 
what you might come across. We had been working at a coal mine about 
seventy kilometers downstream.  The workers went on strike, so we 
borrowed one of the trucks. Nobody would miss it until they went back 
to work. That wouldn't be for a few weeks. 

Some polite questions in the village, backed up with a handful of pesos,
bought a lot of right answers and a couple of maps.  Harry parked the 
truck in the town square. We loaded our backpacks, ate a good meal in 
the marketplace and got a good night's sleep. 

Next morning, we headed for the hills on foot.  By sundown, we had
crossed three deep ravines and come upon a tumbled shack.  A disarrayed 
skeleton was scattered on the bed and floor.  From the droppings, at 
least five kinds of animals and birds had relieved it of its flesh.  
Harry looked in all the closets, while I poked under things. 

"Found it!" I heard him sing out, "Don't stop looking."  He held up a
little sack.  It was a lot heavier than it looked. 

We didn't rest until we found ten small bags packed with golden grains
and nuggets.  Each sack weighed about six pounds.  The bags were woven 
from a sisal of the kind used for shipping coffee.  Each bag was sewn 
shut by a coarse blue thread, at top and bottom.  If we just left this 
poor miner to rot in peace, and sold his gold, we could each retire 
graciously, young enough to enjoy it. 

But no, Harry the Asshole wouldn't have it that way.  As the sun set, he
hacked away at the shack.  Chips flew from his machete and the rotted 
boards collapsed, breaking open on the floor.  My flashlight showed 
yellow grains all over, now.  The singing of the gold was roaring in my 
ears, driving me crazy.  Harry cut open the mattress and it concealed 
more sacks and papers -- a claim and deeds to the property, rights to 
the gold.  Pieces of skeleton were scattered everywhere. 

We spent half an hour tying sacks of gold to our belts.  I took off my
socks and stuffed a half-dozen gold-bags into them, then slung them 
around my neck.  Luckily it was too dark to see.  Harry stepped out to 
relieve himself, and I slumped in a corner, digging into my pack for 
the chunk of dried meat I usually carry for snacks away from home.  I 
was about to bite in when Harry gave a bloodcurdling scream. 

I grabbed a lantern and ran out the door. Before I could reach Harry, I
saw them: two merchants dirk-slashed to ribbons.  They had been hanging 
there while we were hacking up the shack and stashing its owner's gold. 


The warning was clear enough.  Could we escape alive? Reality suddenly
became a television drama.  I stood there trying to decide, when Harry 
came by, seized my arm and dragged me with him, still screaming like a 
lunatic.  It was dark as pitch, except for the lantern I still held. 

Doubled over in the underbrush, we scuttled down ravines and up sharp
dry rocks.  My pick hammer ripped off its pouch and tumbled down a 
cliff wall. It was still dark. If I didn't douse the lamp, whatever was 
pursuing us would use it as a beacon.  I smashed it just as Harry came 
up smack against a tree. I heard him grunt in the dark, and slump down. 
 Thrashing and shouting passed us distantly to my left, and I realized 
with relief that we had not yet been caught. Soon the sounds died away 
and the forest grew silent. 

I used Harry as a pillow that night, until the sun woke us.  He was
furious. I was hungry. When Harry's head stopped bleeding and he could 
hear himself over the express train between his ears, he led the way, 
skulking up and down forest paths until we stumbled on a freshet.  We 
drank and washed off the acrid sweat of fear, then splashed downstream 
until we came to a village, devoid of any sign of life.  Clearly 
everyone was out either hunting or gathering.  Not even an aging 
sentinel guarded the wicket. 

Around us were eight or ten crude, thatched shelters.  We stood in a
central plaza paved with white hemispherical cobbles, large and small. 
Each had two or three holes, like a bowling ball, all facing westward.  
Now and then, one was broken open, like an eggshell, and I realized 
that these weren't stones at all.  All its teeth were still in place.  
Harry began foraging in one hut after another.  He turned up with a 
well-worn machete, a two-headed pregnant terra cotta figure adorned 
with bright feathers, and a golden amulet, crude and heavy. 

"You carry it," I told him.  "If I take on one more ounce of gold, I'll
sink right to the center of the earth!  Where the hell are we, anyway?" 


He grinned sourly, tucked the figurine into his trousers beneath his
paunch, and rolled his sleeve up over the amulet until it fit into his 
armpit.  "No food," he grunted, and set off downstream again at a brisk 
pace.  I followed, hoping we wouldn't run into any live head-hunting 
predators. 

"This is the twentieth century," I kept telling myself.  "All the head-
hunters are gone."  But it didn't sound very convincing.  We were a 
long way from the truck. 

A half-hour downstream, the watercourse widened; there were shallow
pools where we knew that wildlife must come down to drink.  Stepping 
more cautiously, Harry edged toward a broken tree limb that dangled 
down into the water.  A thick vine was entwined around it and Harry 
began to hack away at it with the rusty machete.  The vine came to 
life. 

It turned out to be a torpid anaconda, sleepily digesting a whole young
tapir.  As Harry slit open its belly, I retched with disgust;  but 
minutes later, we were sharing the sweet pink flesh with ravenous 
appetites. 

Here, downstream, we found gold nuggets and grains with sharp, yellow
edges -- most were the size of a millet seed -- all were soft as putty, 
Virgin pure, as only Mother Nature can make gold.  The mouth of the 
cave was visible, up the ravine a short way, and a branch of this 
stream flowed out of it.  What an ineffable sight!  This little rill 
only a yard wide was filtering sweetly through its gravel bed, 
nourishing the tufted green llano-grass on its banks -- chucking little 
gold nuggets down into the valley below.  Pure gold.  Upstream, there 
had to be more.  We followed the little rill to its source, in the 
cave. 

Harry sniffed deeply.  "There's another five hundred kilos at least,
inside the cave.  I can smell it," he said. 

Begging your indulgence, let me point out that right now five hundred
kilos of gold is worth roughly $2,000,000.  Who needed more powerful 
incentives?  I gave in.  My better judgment said that cave was bad 
medicine, so I ignored it, shut my eyes and followed Harry in like a 
sheep.  It was all over in five minutes. 

*  *  * 

I laid Harry out not far from the cave, in that little stream where he
had dug out nuggets with his fingers, in the gold-laden sand, without a 
casket.  Here, in the headwaters of some budding young river, choked 
with half a ton of gold, his dead body would slowly decompose.  All I 
had to do was to get away; but the gold riveted me there. 

There I was, surrounded by half a ton of gold, trapped like a rat in a
narrow valley, with head hunters after my skull.  Harry was dead and 
buried.  My socks had become a gold-filled albatross about my neck.  
And I was lost in the Colombian rain forest, God knows how many miles 
from wherever.  It was a scene from a really bad movie.  Fortunately, 
things couldn't get much worse. 

That was when I sprained my ankle.  It wasn't too bad -- I could still
walk a little, by waving my arms about to keep my balance.  Somehow I 
went on.  Without warning, my wild thrashings wedged my wrist into a 
tree-crotch and I became its prisoner. 

I hung there in disbelief, my fingers becoming numb, feet half-off the
ground, with my trousers edging their way downward every time I 
twitched.  Some large insect was hovering beside my nose, examining my 
left eye very closely.  I closed my eyelids and cried inwardly to the 
powers-that-be for salvation.  A golden albatross hung around my neck.  
I could feel my vocal cords constricted with fear.  It was getting hard 
to breathe ..... 

Something was poking me, slapping my face.  I wheezed in enough air to
stay alive a few more seconds, and opened my eyes. 

She was standing so close to me, I felt the heat radiating from her
body.  She wore two large gold rings in her ears.  The amulet I thought 
I buried with Harry hung from a chain around her neck. 

"Wot the hell you doing here strung up like a leg of veal?" she
demanded. "How the hell you get here? Where the hell you think you 
going?" 

At this point, my heavy belt slipped over my hips.  I hung there, naked
as a snake.  The silence was deafening.  Her eyes opened wide and her 
timid smile became a grin.  I passed out. 

A day later, I woke to the rocking of my litter, suspended from poles
and jolting over the shoulders of four hefty men.  Reality had all the 
character of a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Here, in twentieth 
century Colombia, I had been captured by....by.....well, at least they 
weren't flesh-eating natives!  And one of them spoke English -- and my 
pants were buckled too tight -- and the gold ... the gold was gone! 

Porters ahead of me toted two crudely made crates full of something very
heavy: the boxes were quite small.  They handled everything carelessly. 
 The crates caromed off sharp ledges as they climbed the rocky steppe.  
Finally, the procession stopped and rested in a great courtyard flanked 
by a temple.  I looked around, but nothing was stirring.  The stones 
must have been quite old: they were covered with moss and vines, except 
where footpaths crossed from the shrine to the jungle. 

People dressed in dirty white suits surrounded us.  Only one carried a
rifle.  They all wore hard hats.  My cage was opened and I stepped out. 
The woman I had seen face-to-face came up to me. 

"You screw up our geosurvey operations one more time and we'll really
eat you for dinner!"  She was certainly fierce.  The porters burst into 
hearty laughter.  I watched misbelieving as they picked up their tools 
again and trotted back down the trail toward the cave. 

"We radioed for the copter!" she said.  "Now you get the hell outta here
and don't come back!  And take your bloody gold with you!" 

Sure enough, a helicopter settled into the square not far from us.  It
unloaded two men and several cartons, then sat there, waiting to take 
on cargo.  I followed the two heavy crates on board.  She never even 
told me her name. 

Her company's 'copter flew low over the Gulf of Mexico -- with a
stopover on the tip of Cuba for refueling -- and dropped me at a Texas 
road house about 9 hours later.  The pilots dumped off both crates and 
never asked a question. 

I slept at the motel for three days, content in knowing that every
golden grain beneath my bed was safe:  American Customs officials 
weren't aware of their existence; and the gold was unregistered in 
Colombia. With Harry gone, my share came to 2.4 million! 

For the first time in my life I really had something to look forward to!


*   *   * 


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