around the jambs. What lay under the grass and vines was a mystery.
He slowed the car, bumping off onto the shoulder. A knot of people stood around in front of the roadside stand that sold strawberries and corn and tomatoes in the spring and summer, and pumpkins in the fall, all of it grown on government property, which wore the fruits and vegetables as a clever disguise. Hinged sheets of plywood had been dropped across the front of the stand to close it up for the night, so the people—a couple of families with children from the look of it—weren’t buying anything. They were clearly up to something else. Another carload pulled in directly behind Andrew, and what seemed to be a half-dozen children piled out and went shouting away past his car, a large woman in a wraparound garment climbing ponderously out after them and yelling them into submission.
Andrew followed just for the adventure of it—something that Beams Pickett would approve of. There was a sign posted, advertising, of all things, a treasure hunt. It referred to a companion ad in the
Seal Beach Herald
, Pickett’s newspaper. The newspaper advertisement no doubt explained the carloads of curious people. Treasures were to be buried, the sign said, no end of them, and the public could come dig for them, on the night of Sunday the 24th, by moonlight. Penlights were allowed, nothing bigger than that, though, and the public could keep what it found. There was a diamond ring, it said, in a hermetically sealed glass box, and a glass paperweight in a wooden box, and tickets for two dinners at Sam’s Seafood, which weren’t, Andrew assumed, in any sort of box at all. There were five hundred children’s toys, and a real treasure chest full of quartz crystals and fluorite and bags of rhinestones and glass beads. No maps would be provided. The public would furnish their own spades.
Andrew recalled such a thing from the past. What was it?—almost thirty-five years ago. It had been a fairly common practice in central Orange County, when vast tracts of houses were routing out orange groves and bean fields, and driving up the price of land so that small farmers couldn’t afford to keep it. For a time it had been the fashion for farmers to let the populace spade up their acreage for them. They’d bury rolls of pennies and such, and let suburban hordes do a week’s worth of work in a night. It had always seemed an unlikely practice to Andrew, although he approved of the notion because of the mystery and romance associated with digging for spurious treasures in a weedy pasture by moonlight. It appealed to his sense of—what? He couldn’t quite define it.
He drove away mulling it over. It made a certain amount of sense two score years ago, when hundreds of farmers owned little tracts of land up and down the roads leading south toward the beaches—just a couple of acres or so—and sold roadside produce to wring out a living. But that was all gone years since, and now what farmland was left was owned by vast real estate companies that, in some indefinable way, let out bits of land for farming in order to gain some sort of nebulous tax profits. Nobody “spaded up” the land anymore.
Still, that didn’t mean that there was some sort of secret motive in this moonlight-spading business, did it? He’d have to watch that sort of jumping-to-conclusions. It was too easy to raise people’s eyebrows. He suspected, somewhere inside him, that Rose “put up with him” sometimes. In the best possible way, she was conventional. There wasn’t any more to it than that. She was conventional; he wasn’t. His antics made her tired. He knew that, and he wished it weren’t so. But they seemed to inhabit different worlds sometimes, different universes. Hers was neatly mapped out. The streets that seemed to run north and south
did
run north and south, seven days a week, and if a farmer planted pumpkins it was simply because Halloween was drawing near and he could sell them at a
He slowed the car, bumping off onto the shoulder. A knot of people stood around in front of the roadside stand that sold strawberries and corn and tomatoes in the spring and summer, and pumpkins in the fall, all of it grown on government property, which wore the fruits and vegetables as a clever disguise. Hinged sheets of plywood had been dropped across the front of the stand to close it up for the night, so the people—a couple of families with children from the look of it—weren’t buying anything. They were clearly up to something else. Another carload pulled in directly behind Andrew, and what seemed to be a half-dozen children piled out and went shouting away past his car, a large woman in a wraparound garment climbing ponderously out after them and yelling them into submission.
Andrew followed just for the adventure of it—something that Beams Pickett would approve of. There was a sign posted, advertising, of all things, a treasure hunt. It referred to a companion ad in the
Seal Beach Herald
, Pickett’s newspaper. The newspaper advertisement no doubt explained the carloads of curious people. Treasures were to be buried, the sign said, no end of them, and the public could come dig for them, on the night of Sunday the 24th, by moonlight. Penlights were allowed, nothing bigger than that, though, and the public could keep what it found. There was a diamond ring, it said, in a hermetically sealed glass box, and a glass paperweight in a wooden box, and tickets for two dinners at Sam’s Seafood, which weren’t, Andrew assumed, in any sort of box at all. There were five hundred children’s toys, and a real treasure chest full of quartz crystals and fluorite and bags of rhinestones and glass beads. No maps would be provided. The public would furnish their own spades.
Andrew recalled such a thing from the past. What was it?—almost thirty-five years ago. It had been a fairly common practice in central Orange County, when vast tracts of houses were routing out orange groves and bean fields, and driving up the price of land so that small farmers couldn’t afford to keep it. For a time it had been the fashion for farmers to let the populace spade up their acreage for them. They’d bury rolls of pennies and such, and let suburban hordes do a week’s worth of work in a night. It had always seemed an unlikely practice to Andrew, although he approved of the notion because of the mystery and romance associated with digging for spurious treasures in a weedy pasture by moonlight. It appealed to his sense of—what? He couldn’t quite define it.
He drove away mulling it over. It made a certain amount of sense two score years ago, when hundreds of farmers owned little tracts of land up and down the roads leading south toward the beaches—just a couple of acres or so—and sold roadside produce to wring out a living. But that was all gone years since, and now what farmland was left was owned by vast real estate companies that, in some indefinable way, let out bits of land for farming in order to gain some sort of nebulous tax profits. Nobody “spaded up” the land anymore.
Still, that didn’t mean that there was some sort of secret motive in this moonlight-spading business, did it? He’d have to watch that sort of jumping-to-conclusions. It was too easy to raise people’s eyebrows. He suspected, somewhere inside him, that Rose “put up with him” sometimes. In the best possible way, she was conventional. There wasn’t any more to it than that. She was conventional; he wasn’t. His antics made her tired. He knew that, and he wished it weren’t so. But they seemed to inhabit different worlds sometimes, different universes. Hers was neatly mapped out. The streets that seemed to run north and south
did
run north and south, seven days a week, and if a farmer planted pumpkins it was simply because Halloween was drawing near and he could sell them at a
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