Excerpt: Corbalo's Gold

CHAPTER ONE

Fifty-year-old Taylor Barnes liked to think of himself as a well-adjusted, reasonably attractive, late bloomer with a fairly firm grasp on reality.  So it is therefore no great wonder that he was feeling somewhat out of place in the office of Dr. Nathan Fisher, Psychiatrist~perhaps not unlike the pope might feel at a porno flick.
    "You said on the phone, Mr. Barnes, that you think you may have lost control.  Would you like to tell me about it?"  Fisher began tapping his number two Ticonderoga on the yellow legal in his lap and Barnes felt caught in the gaze of those steel gray eyes that looked like they could penetrate right into his brain if he'd let them.  Fidgeting a little he looked around the room at the furnishings.  It was just the way he'd thought it would be~should be, at these prices, and on the twentieth floor of a Miami skyscraper~all leather and mahogany with just a faint smell of pipe tobacco hanging in the air. He was beginning to wish he hadn't come.  Maybe this whole thing was a big mistake.  By the phrasing of that opening question Fisher had already made himself, to Barnes, the quintessential shrink; patronizingly intimidating, unnervingly condescending.
    "That was what you said, wasn't it, Mr. Barnes?" Fisher prompted.
    "What, that I may have lost control?  Well yeah, I guess... but not the way you make it sound.  What I meant is that I'm starting to think maybe something that happened to me a couple of years ago went a little beyond the normal realm of coincidence.  When I look back on what took place in my life in the spring and summer of eighty-five, I just have to wonder if that whole scenario wasn't choreographed by somebody.  And if that's not crazy enough for you, I'm wondering if that somebody might be a pirate who died a hundred and seventy-five years ago."
    "Is that what you believe?"  Fisher tapped the number two against his raised left eyebrow.
    "I don't want to believe it.  I'd much rather go with that old adage... How does it go?  'The swift don't always have the race or the mighty ones the battle, for time and chance befall them all.'  I guess in today's language that translates into 'Stuff happens.'"  
    Barnes grinned and Fisher wrote something on his pad about euphemistic creativity.
    "You feel that's a better answer?"
    "It's certainly a more preferable one.  It's an answer I can live with anyway."
    "And the other idea?"
    "The other idea is crazy--that some long gone pirate was using us to finish something he wasn't able to while he was still alive.  That's the answer I can't live with, but it's the one that makes the most sense.  I can just see this weirdo, up in the sky in a big crow's nest, pushing buttons and pulling strings, dumping this huge jackpot in our laps, then throwing every unpredictable obstacle in our path and giggling at all those predictable mistakes he knew we'd make."
    "So there were others involved?"
    "Yeah...  There were."  A shadow crossed Barnes' face and Fisher wrote something else on his pad.  "And that's why it's so hard to figure.  The timing had to have been perfect.  If I hadn't just buried my wife a few short weeks before meeting Julie, things couldn't have fallen into place the way they did.  I would never have gotten involved with Sydney Tuck, never met Beek McGill, or got on the wrong side of Slick Moran.  I know I would never have developed an affinity with Don Corbalo Delarosa and his cause, and I sure as hell would never have gotten my hands on his gold."
    "Gold?"  Barnes thought he saw Fisher's ears perk up.
    "More than three tons of it and we had everything we needed to make it happen--the book, the map, even the newspaper article giving us proof positive that it was all true.  The gold was there waiting for us, all right.  We just had to go get it, and all our problems would be history."
    "That sounds simple enough."
    "Yeah, well, obviously that's not exactly the way it turned out.  If it did I wouldn't be here.  I'd be lounging poolside at some island resort, sucking pina coladas though an umbrella straw.  But I am here because it's decision time again, and this time I want to be sure that I'm the one making it."  Concern now laced his voice and was duly noted on Fisher's pad.  "I'm kind of hoping you can set me straight, Doc.  I need to know if it was all just co-inkeedink that first time around, or was something more involved?  And if it was Delarosa pulling the strings back then is he still at it- and is he with me or against me?"
    "Well, I'm afraid, Mr. Barnes, I haven't had much experience with the paranormal, but let's see if we can't sort it out together.  Suppose you make yourself comfortable on the couch and tell me the whole story just as it occurred."
    "O.K., but it's not gonna be easy for me," Barnes said, moving over to the couch.  "Some of those things that happened are still pretty painful to talk about.  I guess they always will be."
    "Well perhaps I can help with that problem too.  You're my last appointment for the day, so just relax and start from the beginning."
    "The beginning.  I guess that was a couple of weeks after Gina died..."
    "Gina was your wife?"
    "For twenty-five years--and in a way, I died with her.  I was devastated.  But then Julie came along and jump-started my life.  I'd made the mistake of heading into a bar and thus ending seven years of tea totaling.  Whether what I was feeling was guilt, remorse, or just plain loneliness, it was more than I wanted to bear in a state of utter sobriety, so I stopped off at a noisy, smoky, neighborhood tavern in Fort Lauderdale.  It was a place that Gina and I used to frequent back in those happy-go-lucky days before I would ever admit that I might just have a leetle problem.  One drink wouldn't hurt, I told myself, but I knew damn good and well I wasn't going to stop at one.  That first double scotch/rocks went down so smooth it called for just one more for a chaser.  By the third one I told the barkeep to hold the rocks.  About three more doubles straight up and I started getting loud.  It didn't matter much.  The Olive Pit was noisier and smokier than usual that night, with most of the action going on twenty feet across from where I was sitting-- over on the other side of the circular bar.  The only one within earshot of me was a sweet young thing three stools down to my right and she seemed to be wrapped up in her own set of troubles. She was peering deeply through the ice-cubes into the sparkling clear liquid in the cocktail glass she was slowly swirling in her hand.

I remember saying something like...

"It stinks!  The whole rotten world stinks to high heaven."
    "Tell me about it!" said the sweet young thing.  She meant it as a simple acknowledgment, a kindred spirit commiserating with a lost soul, but snockered as I was, I took it as a request for details, and was more than willing to oblige. 
    I started talking about Gina, how for those twenty-five years all I ever wanted to do was please her but how I never went about it right.
    "We were's differ'nt 's night and day, me and Gina," I slurred to her across the three-stool-wide, smoky expanse separating us.  The conversation was all one sided and came in spurts.
    "Dunno how she put up with me all those years...  Never could give her what she deserved...  She was a queen...  Shooda hadda palace...  stedda bouncin' round fum one 'partment to the next...  married t'a bum like me...
    "Never stayed with a job long enough to get anywhere...  Always a golden opportunity knockin' at the end of the rainbow...  Just around the bend on the other side of the fence...  where the grass is greener."
    When inebriated, I tend somewhat to mix my metaphors.  She was a good listener, though.  There was just once, there, when I got the feeling she was trying to get out of the conversation.  The vibes she was sending out seemed to be saying, "Tell it to the chaplain."  I was ready to give it up anyway.  By that time I had developed a serious case of hiccups.
    "Sorry...  Didn't mean to dump on ya," I managed to get out between hics.
    "No problem."  She smiled just a little and it seemed like the room got brighter as she did.  "Sometimes you just need to unload," she said.
    Oh did I ever need to unload.  I'd been carrying that burden long enough.  The weight was becoming more than I could handle.  I was wanting to tell her the whole story.  All of it- about Gina, about her love-  How she stuck by me all those years when nothing was going right.  Like when the recession hit and left me without a job, and she went out and got a waitressing gig to keep the money coming in while I bounced around from one get-rich-scheme to the next, chasing rainbows that always petered out before leading me to the pot of gold...  Like the heavy drinking that never solved anything, and came close to destroying everything we had...  Like the middle-age-crazies that got the better of me when I suddenly realized I was forty and a nobody.  God, what she had to put up with.  The woman was a saint.
    But we had survived all that.  I finally managed to kick the booze, and with the rebirth of my self-esteem our relationship had grown stronger than ever.
    I wanted to tell this gal about North Carolina.  About how we'd answered an ad in the Fort Lauderdale News and bought a piece of property on the side of a mountain overlooking a wide spot in the road called Byrdville...  About our dream of cutting down trees and building a log cabin, so we'd have to a place to run to and rusticate whenever the rat race became unbearable.
    Oh yeah, I wanted to tell her, but it just seemed like it wasn't any of her damn business.  It was a dream that belonged to me and Gina and I sure wasn't about to share something as sacred as that with somebody I didn't even know.
    Waving my empty glass to get the attention of the balding, fiftyish saloon keeper, I yelled, "Hey George," for all the world to hear.  "Another one of these and whatev' my fren is havin'."
    That's what I did, all right, and she never saw it coming.  Such an innocent little gesture, but it was enough to obligate her under that unwritten code of the neighborhood tavern.  Her acceptance of that libation made her an officially deputized Mother Confessor, totally bound and committed to treat anything I tell her from that point on as sacrosanct.
    Well that was the way I saw it anyway in my scotch soaked mental state, and apparently she didn't have anything better to do for the next couple of hours, so, what the hell?  Why not?
    I blurredly saw her through the smoke filled air as she raised her vodka/tonic in my direction, moved two stools closer, and said, "So- you from around here?"
    It got smokier and blurrier from then on.  I guess I must have pretty much talked her ear off before passing out.  I have a vague recollection of her waking me up and helping me into a car.