“What’s going on?”
“The Gauchos are dancing. I guess the auction went well today.”
“I can see that, I mean with you?’
“Oh,” he turned his sad eyes to me, his eyes were always sad; you didn’t want to play poker with him “I had a bad day.”
“Me too, what’re we drinking?”
“Whatever you’re buying and I’ll go first.”
“Dos Cerveza” I shouted at the bartender “Negra Modelo” I looked into his sad eyes “Let me guess, you lost another tourist.”
“Yes. An American. Salt Marsh.”
“Dead?”
“Not as far as anyone is going to know. Perhaps he found a Donkey or a gondola, rode to Bogota living on fish or parrots, perhaps …”
“Bogota?” His eyes were sad “Gracias,” I said to the bartender. “That’s you’re problem with that story? Ok, Rio than, he hopped a train, donkey in the gondola balanced on his shoulder. He’ll write a famous account of it for the Dallas Herald.”
“Morning News, it’s the Dallas/Ft Worth Morning news.”
His sad eyes really wanted to be incredulous sometimes.
“Huh. Morning News. What do they call the late edition? So what happened to you? You cry War and release the Dog of Havoc?”
“Who’s Havoc?”
“Sells weed in Greek town, calls it ganja, has the worst West Indies accent this side of …” he pulled on his beer, paused “Bogota, little Jamaica.”
I snorted “The Gauchos aren’t the only ones dancing tonight.”
“So? What happened?”
“Nothing. I was up early, I went to Gustavo’s, took my seat on the credenza, ordered coffee, black, two cubes of sugar and a croissant. Two girls passed by me, giggling, a car ran the sign at the corner of San Marcos and whateverthehellthatother street is, almost hit a messenger but didn’t. I bought papaya at the market, Mrs. Morales asked after my mother, I …”
“Oh. Ennui. I get it. You checked your mail box, you bought a box of Chiclets, you stared at your laptop screen all day.”
“Yes.”
“May I tell you a story?”
“I am convinced you are incapable of anything else.”
He turned those sad eyes on me. He knew they were sad. He did play poker. Again, I believe he was looking for incredulity.
“In the mid nineteenth century there was a gold rush,” he paused.
“California or Alaska?”
His sad eyes measured me.
“Alaska. Among the few Sourdoughs that hit the color was an Italian national, Don Del Rado.”
“Lucius? Leslie? Lawrence? His name was L. Del Rado right?”
“Ok, you tell the story then.”
“I’m sorry, please …”
“And though once you’ve tasted the charms of the land of the midnight Sun …”
“What?”
“Oh, I was waiting for you to tell me it was the Midnight Examiner or the Midnight Herald or the Midnight/noon morning news …”
“Now who’s being snarky, please, and the next two are on you.”
“Where was I?”
“Charms, Midnight Examiner …”
“Oh, Yes. He had cleared a lot of timber on the claim he staked, and, enterprising and recently rich, he set about cutting, treating and bending the timber into boards and he built, for his own nostalgia, a gondola…”
I snorted, “Some symmetry, he have a mule too?” I got the bartenders attention, held up two fingers and pointed to my old friend.
“It was beautiful, enameled a dark mahogany, filigreed, bent as sure as Suleiman’s slippers.”
I snorted again. When the rains came he could stretch a tale for months by referencing everything he knew.
“Tklingit-Haida would leave their nets to come to see this rich white man’s improbable canoe. Sourdoughs who’d mortgaged their fathers land to pan dirt on the tundra would talk of nothing else around the campfire.
During the melt-off of 18 ’cough-cough’ and six he enlisted twenty dog sled teams and a hundred men to haul her off her moorings and down to Seward’s …”
“Wrong century for Seward.” I was immediately ashamed. It really was a privilege to be his audience. The bartender arrived and I handed him a bill, waved off the slow attempt at change and added two quick gracias’s.
“I can’t pronounce the Inuit name for the river. Its headwaters are north of Fairbanks and the delta Cooks inlet.” He gave me the hairy eyeball, daring me to challenge James Cook’s legacy. Still, more sad than hairy.
“There was much fanfare as the traghetti was lowered and a great hulk of a man, a half breed Dena'ina/Ukrainian that the sourdoughs all called chief, handed Del Rado a punting pole he had carved himself like a totem from St. Petersburg. And Del Rado pushed against the shore.” He took a long pull of his beer, reflected, took another, and looked up from under at me with those pale sad eyes.
“So? What happened?”
“The dumb son of a bitch got caught in the current, capsized and froze to death before he could make it to shore. Flat bottomed boats are for still waters.”
I coughed. “And?”
“If they had ever found the body and bothered digging him a grave with a tombstone it’d say something like ‘I wish my worst trouble and fortune was boredom’.”
“I understand the Dena'ina/Ukrainian did have a grave and an inscription ‘Fuck, I lost another tourist, maybe he took a dog sled to Bogota.’”
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