Marathon
The First Adventure in the Cozy Adventures of Nick the Numismatist
Nick is outside for a smoke.
They were bringing the car around.
For the moment he is alone outside with the pale, icy landscape of Texas where it drifts off through freezing winds to the endless cold of the Wide West under a washed-out, dead blue sky. The Texas he saw was a drifting expanse that had only ever been really itself when it was a warm shallow sea gazed upon by the last dinosaurs on Earth. Oh the end would come billowing like a frozen Hindenburg Disaster the size of North America and much much much colder.
That was Nick. That was his soul. Or what you would see inside his mind if you washed it clean of all the stacked images of really very old money – the interior (so to speak) back beyond the big exploding hydrogen envelope: Just the most Nicky-esque parts of Nick – the ghost of shallow sea full of extinct animals waiting for the next asteroid to hit. Anyway the bitter wind was blowing from the west right through his threadbare green socker team hoody, an old grey sweater and a cotton shirt that had seen better days long ago.
He gave up. They were never going to bring the car around. He tossed the cigarette into the graveled drive and took a last look into the eye of the cold cold wind. “Texas,” he muttered. “The coldest place on Earth. Who needs Greenland when they can have Texas?”
Back inside the main building of the Martinside compound, Nick got through the atrium and the foyer, stopped shivering, left the tiled floors and came to a strange expanse of green carpet in a mysteriously subdued round, greenhouse-like region with murky skylights and big, leafy plants. There was a tall, silky, auburn-haired woman standing there next to a big stone table looking curiously undressed, though she was wearing a lot of assorted clothing such as a big, thick brown fuzzy sweater and a sort of chartreuse silk kimono kind of thing. Maybe the somewhat undressed look was the result was partly the result the strange elegance of her bare feet or the languid angle of her head or the extraordinarily abundant flowing length of her dark, coppery hair or the fact that she seemed to be waking up slowly despite being steady on her legs.
As Nick got closer, he found that the woman was exuding a lot of some kind of extreme perfume as if she had had some kind of serious accident with a big decanter of shockingly expensive liquid scent– something Aesopian, fragmentary, fabulous – like the moral equivalent of a code word for something else in plain sight.
Nick stopped between two large plants. The woman pointed at him and said, “You’re Nick. You’re driving me to Marathon.”
“I am?”
“They left me at the Oculus. I had to win back all my money and…”
“And?” asked Nick.
“Then some. A lot of money.”
“You are to be commended,” nodded Nick.
“But they left me. It took all night to win it all back. I need to change.” She started to leave the room but turned back.
“Of course,” said Nick.
“I’m your cousin Melody. Melody Martinside. We met once at Vacation Bible School. You were Grindale the Puppet Master.”
“Yes.” Nick did some more earnest nodding.
“Don’t leave without me. You’ll be sorry.”
“I don’t even have the car yet.”
“Wait for me.”
“I’ll wait,” affirmed Nick. Melody left.
Melody’s great grandmother, Alex, even taller than Melody, came into the round, green room just after Melody left. She wore an austere, pale blue kimono. “She’s in a state. You have to take her to Marathon for L-Jane’s wedding. She hasn’t slept in days. Something is wrong with her. She’ll be okay. Don’t worry. Just drive her out to Marathon. You’re going there anyway.”
“I’ll drive her,” said Nick.
“She’s your cousin. You met her long ago. She remembers you. You probably don’t remember her. She’s not usually like this. I hope she sleeps in the car. She needs to sleep before the wedding.”
“I’m sure she will,” said Nick with as much certainty as he could manage.
“She will,” declared Alex. “Come play cards with us. The car isn’t ready.”
Nick went and played poker with Alex and his father’s aunts by his second marriage, Mary and Pauline. He went in for a hundred in chips and lost all that. They loaned him another pile of chips. He lost that too and they stopped.
“You are unlucky,” said Alex sympathetically.
“Someday,” said Mary wistfully, “You will pay all your debts.”
“Before you die,” smiled Pauline.
“We’ll see,” said Alex as Melody came into the room. She was dressed for a long drive in a small car: small brown slippers, big brown socks, red pedal-pushers, and an extra-large men’s cotton jacquard cardigan with big buttons, three generous thick belt ties, big pockets and a jagged “southwestern” pattern.
Alex frowned briefly at all that and said to Nick, “Take her phone. She needs to sleep.”
Nick stood up from the emptiness of the poker game and approached Melody. Melody look some orange sunglasses from a pocket, put them on slowly and said, “It’s in back with the blankets and shovels.”
Pauline asked with some concern, “Can you see in those?”
“No.”
“You’ll have to wake up in Ballinger,” said Alex. “There’s something you’ll need to get.”
“Oh.”
Alex motioned to Pauline. Pauline pulled a heavy leather bag out from under her chair. Alex said, “There’s a note in the bag. Instructions. The Miller Place. L-Jane’s gift.”
Pauline stood up, took the bag and went to Melody. “This is the poker stash.” Melody took the bag. Metallic objects clinked together heavily inside of it.
“Sure,” said Melody.
“Now go,” said Alex. “Take the stash and go. I’m tired of your stink.”
An few hours later, they were humming along in the Starlight Coupe near Lampasas. As the highway started down into the river valley, Nick pushed in the overdrive lever and shifted down on the three-on-a-tree on the steering column. The resulting minor automotive lurching skewed Melody’s orange sunglasses and woke her up. “It’s dark,” she said looking out at the cloudy sky through one half of her sunglasses.
“Sorry,” said Nick.
Melody twisted herself away from the window. “Sorry.” She took her glasses off and looked Nick over with a frown on her face as if she wondered who he was. She put her sunglasses away and said, “You can call me Mel. Melody was my father’s idea.”
“I never…” said Nick as he tried to remember anything at all about Mel or Melody or her father.
“You never met Darryl? Now there was man. A very large man.”
“We Grindales are smaller,” nodded Nick helpfully. “Always have been, so they say.”
Mel was skeptical suddenly. “Smaller? How small are you? You’re not that short are you?” She looked Nick over again more appraisingly.
“No,” said Nick. “I’ve grown since my Vacation Bible School Days. I noticed when I saw you this morning. I’m nearly as tall as you are now that I’ve grown up some.”
“I’m not tall for a Martinside.” Mel proved some of what she was trying to convey as she stretched out straight and long in her seat and bumped her head.
“Careful.”
“This car is tiny,” she observed.
Down in the valley, they crossed a bridge. The sky got darker. Shadows swooped over the land around them. Nick downshifted again as the highway started up out of the valley. The scoot into the uphill acceleration was somewhat reassuring after all. “Apparently, it’s a classic and it’s running okay at the moment. Somebody is paying a lot in cash and coin for it out in Marathon.”
“Marathon.” Mel scowled and looked out the window for a glimpse of a river winding away on its muddy way down out of the north through murky, dim, green trees. She thought things over, looked at Nick and said, “Can we stop? Soon? I need coffee.”
“Sure,” said Nick, “but don’t you need to sleep?”
“Soon,” said Mel, “maybe, but right now I need some coffee and some pain killers.”
“Sure.”
“Headache.” Mel slumped back in her seat. “Great Gran Alex was rude.”
Nick handed her his phone. “Find where you want to stop. And I barely noticed your perfume this morning.”
Mel took the phone. “Thanks. They say I interact strangely with some aromas. A high epidermal pH or something.”
“Oh,” nodded Nick.
Mel searched on the phone for a place to get coffee. She made disappointed noises and then said, “There’s a place in Bangs in about 40 miles. A Starbucks. Right on Main Street. That is, take a right onto Main Street and there it is.”
“Right.”
“Right.” She dropped the phone into a voluminous cardigan pocket and fell asleep.
They stopped, got coffee, took pain killers and got a blanket out of the back for Mel. Snow was falling and the wind was blowing hard.
Mel looked up at the dark sky. “This looks bad,” she said as she got into her seat and wrapped up tight in a thick, woolly blanket. Nick handed her a heavily insulated cup of coffee.
“Hot,” he said. He closed her door and then he went around to his side. He got in, closed the door and watched the snow coming down thick and fast over the parking lots and warehouses of Bangs. “It’s six hours out to Marathon. We’ll be getting there after sundown.”
“Not good,” said Mel. “When the snow comes down like this, it can kill you when you go way way out west. Too far out west. The snow kills you.”
“We should just go back. There’s no way to get to Marathon tonight.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m going to miss that wedding but you did wrap this coffee cup nicely and very well. Thanks.”
“We’ll head back.”
“Gracias.”
“No hay de qué.”
Mel drank some coffee, did some thinking, and said, “Puede que haya un problema.”
“What?” asked Nick.
“There may be a problem.”
“What kind of a problem?”
“I don’t know. Hold my coffee.” Nick took her coffee. Mel pulled the heavy leather bag containing the poker stash out from under her feet. She looked warily around the empty snowy parking lots around them and then opened the stash. It contained a lot of loose ammunition, a mess of stripper clips, a long-barreled pistol, and a note.
“Huh,” said Mel sagging back in consternation. “Whaddya know.”
“Antique weaponry and a note.”
She gave the note to Nick. The note said that Ronnie was waiting at the house and that the word to the wise was paraclete. Nick handed it back to Mel. “What does it mean?” Mel shrugged, put the note in the bag and pulled out the pistol. They looked at it. “Automatic?”
Mel turned it a little in her hands. “It’s a Chinese Mauser C96. About a hundred years old. Semi-automatic. Ten 7.63-millimeter shots once you load it from a stripper clip.”
“Or one shot at a time. Better check the chamber.”
“Here.” Mel handed him the pistol. He handed her the coffee and opened his door. He got out of the car to check the chamber. He pointed the pistol down and pushed the wobbly safety lever down. The pistol fired into the concrete under the car just ahead of the driver’s side door. The heavy pistol had only jumped a little much to Nick’s surprise and the ejected spent case flew out, bounced off the side of the car, whipped across Main Street in a whirl of snow, hit the sidewalk and rolled away, driven by the wind.
“Shit,” muttered Nick.
“That’s one way to check.”
Nick’s ears were ringing and he didn’t hear Mel, so he said, “I’m okay, but I might have shot the car.”
“Wow,” said Mel. “Punch the little puncher on the bottom of the magazine and check that.”
“What?”
Mel leaned over and repeated her instructions more loudly. Nick said, “No. The follower came up and the bolt is open. No more bullets. And the bolt is way back and even a little off. This thing will probably blow up the next time somebody shoots it.” Nick tossed the pistol into the backseat with the shovels and got back into the car. He closed the door and shivered.
Mel drank some coffee and said, “At least we are both still alive.”
“There is that,” smiled Nick grimly.
“Now you’re smiling.”
“Things are not going well,” said Nick with a much bigger smile.
“But,” said Mel, “We have to go to Ballinger.”
“Why? What’s in Ballinger?”
“There’s a barn with nothing in it behind a house where no one lives.”
“Sounds like Ballinger.”
“You don’t know…” said Mel.
“Yeah,” said Nick, “but what’s there?”
“Something I have to give to L-Jane.”
“Another poker stash kind of thing?” asked Nick.
“It’s about one hundred pounds of gold with a curse on it.”
“And you’re giving that to L-Jane?”
“She deserves it.”
“But we can’t get to that wedding in Marathon. We should head back. Get out of the storm. You can go to Ballinger another time.”
“Ronnie isn’t going to live much longer and he’s not going out there again.”
“And?” wondered Nick.
“Ronnie won’t give it to anyone but me. He knows I’ll give it to L-Jane.”
“And we can’t just go back there when he’s not there and get the stuff?”
“Gold. A lot of gold.”
“And you…”
“You said we, smiley man,” smiled Mel.
Nick rephrased things. “Somebody can just go back and get the gold some other time.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Only Ronnie knows where it is.”
“How many places could it be? There’s a house and a barn. Dig those up and bingo! Five or six million in gold.”
“There’s a side canyon.”
“A side canyon? Hold on, this is Ballinger we’re talking about. There’s not even a non-side canyon in Ballinger.”
“It’s west northwest. Wagon Rim.”
“I’m not going West Northwest to a place with a side canyon called Wagon Rim with a dying guy to get some accursed gold in a snowstorm for somebody apparently named L-Jane who is to be married in Marathon.”
“You have to,” said Mel. “Or I’ll tell everybody you just chickened out. Just chickened out. Just chickened out…” Mel breathed in deeply to prepare for the rest of her instance on exposing Nick’s cowardice. Nick waited with a concerned look on his face. “Because you’re a liberal professor from a small liberal arts college!” she shouted.
Nick was impressed. He was convinced that being exposed by Mel could be quite painful. He nodded in agreement with everything and only offered a minor correction. “Okay. We will go to Wagon Rim or wherever and get the gold, but I’m only an Assistant Professor of Ancient History.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“Assistant professor?”
“Yes.”
“Ancient History?”
“Yes.”
Mel drank some coffee and asked, “Like Indiana Jones?”
“Pretty much, though with more of an emphasis on coins.”
“Coins?”
“You know,” said Nick, “like real money. Ancient Nickles and copper pennies.”
“And bronze, gold and silver.”
“Sure. Sometimes.”
Mel finished her coffee and thought about that. Then she asked, “And you are going with me and Ronnie into Wagon Rim to get the gold?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t even have a coat,” she said as the wind full of snow shook the car.
“I’ll take a blanket and a shovel.”
“Okay let’s go.”
They got hamburgers in Ballinger. It was getting dark when they headed west northwest looking for the Miller Place – a place with a house where no one lived and a barn with nothing in it.
It was very dark and the snow was getting deeper when they found the Miller mailbox. It was there by the gravel road. All they could see in the headlights was the mailbox on its sturdy post, some tire tracks and a barbed wire fence. The storm had reached the intensity of a full blizzard. “This looks bad,” said Nick. “We might have to spend the night out here.”
“Maybe we can get to the house.”
“Does it have electricity? Is there a stove? It’s really cold out there and the wind is just howling and screaming.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.” The wind was booming around them and Nick couldn’t hear Mel from two feet away.
“What?”
“Don’t be melodramatic!” yelled Mel as the sound of the wind vanished. There was a lull in the blizzard.
“Well…,” said Nick. “I don’t see a car or a truck out here on the road, so if Ronnie is here somewhere, he must have gotten in before the storm because there’s no track where the road to the house must be by the mailbox.”
“Let’s try to get down there. It can be any worse than staying out here on the main road.”
“Okay.” Nick guided the car into the gap in the fence by the mailbox that was where the road to the house probably was. The grade was steep and the car slid past the house as the grey bulk of the barn came into view in the headlights far below them.
“That’s the barn,” said Mel. “Ronnie will be there at the top of the side canyon.”
They started through a thick patch of snow on the road that led straight down to the barn. They were churning through the snow when a big light came on at the tall double door of the barn. A large man in an orange coat stood at the door with a big rifle.
“That’s not Ronnie,” said Mel.
The man pointed the rifle at them and yelled. “Stop and get out.”
Nick said, “Get out and run to the house. I’m not stopping.” Mel opened her door and jumped out into the snow as Nick gave the car plenty of gas to accelerate down the hill. The man with the rifle fired at the car as another man – a small man in a blue coat with a white cowboy hat – came into view at the right corner of the barn. The man in the blue coat came staggering through the deep snow to join the man with the rifle at the door.
“Don’t shoot the car!” the man in the blue coat cried.
“I told them to stop!” the man with the rifle screamed as he took aim at Nick who was now looking horrified and foolish as the car’s roaring engine started pouring out smoke and fire.
“Shit!” shouted the man in blue as he pulled a big pistol out of his coat pocket.
Nick had been angling slightly toward the man in blue but changed his mind and tried to swerve to get more of the car at a better angle between himself and the man with the rifle. This swerve got the left a-pillar of the windshield into the path of a 10-gram bullet going 3000 feet per second and the debris from that chopped off most of the right half of Nick’s face clear to his right ear.
Then things got worse for everyone as the swerving car flipped down the hill and hit the two men by the barn door. Nick pulled the bloody mass of his flaccid facial tissue out of the passenger seat and crawled out of the burning wreckage with it. Once he was clear of the flames, he eased back into the snow, looked up at the sky, massaged the severed portions of his face back into their places and let the accursed cosmic magic of his immortal life do its work to mend him again into the semblance of a man.
Much to Nick’s chagrin, Mel came down the hill and found him lying there and quivering with the shocks of his magical mending. Mel looked at him in horror. She backed away from him as his gruesomely transformative state became clearer in the growing light of the blazing barn. After a minute or two, Nick’s convulsive spasms stopped. He lay still in the snow. Mel came down for a closer look. She got close enough to see that he was breathing and then she backed up a little and said, “Nick?”
“Yes, Mel,” said Nick as clearly as he could. Ammunition began popping off in the fire that was consuming the barn and the car and the two men that had been hit by the car.
Mel backed up and put out her hands in a gesture to forefend whatever he was or even a stray case flying out of the conflagration. “You’re something terrible, aren’t you? I thought so. Gran gran hinted that you were something horrible somehow. Something more horrible than a liberal professor.”
“I’m not that horrible really,” said Nick. “I’m just a little bit immortal and I can’t be killed and I have a curse that mends me magically when I’m hurt. Other than that, I’m mostly okay.”
“Mostly okay?” said Mel in disbelief. “I’ve never seen this much blood and you just killed two men.”
Nick stifled a groan of pure embarrassment as he realized he was lying in the usual pool of magical blood that surrounded him when he was mending under the cursed magic of his immortality. And, of course (and what could be worse?) the blood was steaming and melting the snow around him. Nick said, “You’d better get inside the house. You could freeze to death out here.”
“Nick,” scoffed Mel, “It’s a thousand degrees out here. The whole barn is burning and I’m going to pull you up and away from it before it falls on you.”
“No,” said Nick sitting up. “I can walk. I just didn’t want to frighten you by staggering around like a zombie or something.”
“Are you a zombie?” asked Mel, “You look terrible.”
“Oh,” said Nick, “I’m still healing I guess.” He stood up carefully and shuffled up the hill. Mel stayed a few feet away and kept edging farther and then sliding back to look at Nick.
“You are a mess,” she said. “Are you in pain?”
“Not really,” said Nick. “I’m used to this sort of thing. It’s part of my job.”
“Your job?”
“Oh you know. Sort of being immortal. Being cursed. Walking the world forever.”
“What about liberal education?”
Nick laughed so hard about that that he had to go down on his hands and knees in the snow.
“What’s so funny?” asked Mel with a reluctant smile.
“You know,” he said, standing up and looking slightly less like a zombie, “I can bring a sense of the past…or something. You know I was at Marathon.”
“Marathon?”
“The battle.”
“You were? When was that?”
“Long ago.”
“There was a battle?”
“Yeah,” said Nick as he started to walk up the hill through the snow with some confidence.
“You mean in Ancient Greece.”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s get inside. I’m freezing.”
They got into the house. They started a fire in the woodstove and made a bed on the floor. Mel rested her head on Nick’s belly and said, “Tell me about Marathon.”
“Yeah,” said Nick with a wistful air of remembrance, “There I was – in a detachment of heavy infantry – the Immortals as they were called in the Persian army – the reserve in the center, behind the Sakai, right back by the ships on the beach lucky for me.”
“Sounds nice,” sighed Mel. “The beach. Detachment sounds nice.”
“It was okay, a lovely September, but I had hoped to be doing some serious looting. But no. There were the Athenians on the high ground at the exits from the coastal plain. So we waited for more heavy troops so that we could push through the Greeks in their defenses in the high narrow places in the woods and among some sacred enclosures. Then one morning, while we were settling down to a long wait, everything went wrong. The Greeks came down out of their defenses. We thought we had them and pushed hard and straight on up the middle. But it was clear by lunch time that getting away on the ships was my best plan. So I dumped my gear and went for a swim.”
Nick was about to go on with his adventures and some nice loot he manage to get in Argolis on that trip when he noticed that Mel was asleep and breathing gently and peacefully.