Pleasant Valley Sunday

[Steven Hunley]

I felt I had marching orders and therefore a goal, a destination, and the direction was south. A week later found me at the Bell Inn in downtown San Diego across from a tourist trap called Seaport Village. Although I’d never visited a pub in the U. K., this one seemed authentic. There was a long oak bar with ivory-handled pumps and tables, a beamed ceiling and wood-paneled walls. One more thing was necessary to complete the perfect picture, a neighborhood clientele drunk on camaraderie.

Check. It had that too.

Even though it was early, it was crowded. You expected any minute to see Arthur Seaton tumbling down the stairs, wrestling with the other drunk and angry young men, frothing to the brim with dark bitter ale, Nottingham accents, and swallowed up by depressive moods as dark as the pits.

I love Sillitoe. Just read New and Collected Stories. Nothing like him.

https://youtu.be/f6gY5a8n1Hg Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

[YesNo]

Nice story. It flows well. What happens next?

[Steven Hunley]

A week later found me at the Bell Inn in downtown San Diego across from a tourist trap called Seaport Village. Although I’d never visited a pub in the U. K. this one seemed authentic. There was a long oak bar with ivory-handled pumps and tables, a beamed ceiling and wood-paneled walls. One more thing was necessary to complete the perfect picture, a neighborhood clientele drunk on camaraderie.

Check.

It had that too.

Even though it was early it was crowded. You expected any minute to see Arthur Seaton tumbling down the stairs, wrestling with the other drunk and angry young men, fueled to the brim with dark bitter ale, Nottingham accents, and swallowed up by depressive moods as dark as the pits.

Then I heard, “Howdy, Barkeep, I’ll take a Miller Lite.”

It was a cowboy, a cowboy! I could tell by his boot-cut Levis, snake-skin boots and ten gallon hat.

He caught my eye and responded with a Howdy and a smile, and sat down. The sad beer that sat before me was my last. I was out of money, and since travel relies on money as a precursor, I suspected my mission was about to end with a whimper, not a bang. The cowboy looked over and noticed my empty.

Then his eyes moved to the barkeep filling his order. The cool amber liquid flowing into the glass was topped off by a foaming head, a delicate piece of liquid art. The cowboy rubbed his manly hands together in anticipation.

“Partner, I’m as dry as the Sonoran desert in summer, how about you?”

“Me? I’m as dry as a pop-corn fart.”

“Oooowee! Hear that, Barkeep? You’ve corralled one sharp maverick. Give him another of the same.”

He slapped his knee and then my back. “Where you from?”

“Californ-I-A.”

“That’s as west as you can git. Know anything about horses?”

“Not me,” I shook my head. “Only what they look like. I just saw the film War Horse though. I was amazing how that horse was trained. It must of taken some time and patience.”

“Partner, you’d be surprised how smart horses are. Say, I thought the minute you said film instead of movie, you had an education. Maybe I was wrong. So git on over here and let me tell you a thing or two about horses. If there was a class I’d be doin’ the lecturin’. I’m what you call an expert.”

“You have an M.A. in horses?”

He hooted.

“Feller, it’s more like a P.H.D.”


The next hour we sat at a table and he lectured. He was the only ‘feller’ I ever met that actually sounded like Slim Pickens. Most of the talk was about horses, pedigrees, boots and saddles, Custer, the Seventh Cavalry, but at the same time the beer unleashed his more private side, where he was born, his family, his hopes and dreams, and finally, as he put it, ‘the whole enchilada’.

In the process he wheedled out of me much the same information, and the fact that I was stalled in my travels and broke.

“You know,” he looked thoughtful. “I got a job right now that’s a little too big for me to handle. I could use some help. I need a ramrod.”

I wasn’t sure what a ramrod was, only a vague black and white memory that Clint Eastwood played Rowdy Yates, Gil Favor’s ramrod on Rawhide.

I looked a bit puzzled.

“Don’t you worry yourself, Ishmael, you don’t have to ride ‘em!”

You get a feeling that what’s happening is directed, just like that gold eagle when it rolled into the room off the library and I followed. So what did I do when confronted with Kismet?

“O. K., Sonny. I reckon you got yurself a hired hand.”

That’s me, Cameleon Man, whose miraculous powers allow him to get along with anybody. Maybe I should be a diplomat, and bring peace to the world.

As it turned out a week later, the job wasn’t quite how I pictured it.

I imagined I’d be driving a jeep somewhere on the north forty, mending a barbed wire fence, wearing a pair of sweat-soaked leather gloves, even, saints preserve me, smoking a Marlboro, the smell of purple sage filling my nostrils when I wasn’t exhaling clouds of toxic cigarette smoke, and humming the theme to the Magnificent Seven through manly-clenched teeth.

Instead my assignment was on a small freighter, out in the Pacific, heading towards the Panama Canal, wearing canvas deck shoes, breathing clean sea air, humming What Will We Do with the Drunken Sailor, ready to shave my belly with a rusty razor.

And the horses? The horses were twenty thoroughbred polo ponies whose ultimate corral was on the Lion Castle Polo Estates, St. Thomas, Barbados.

[Captain Pike]

yeah, okay… you got me so far. What happens next?

[Steven Hunley]

Captain, I can't believe you don't recognize this story. It's an oldie but goodie. So what happens next is this:

Me? Ride polo ponies? That was out of the question. I don't even know how to swim. But I had existential questions about all sorts of things.

Sometimes a man has to ask himself, "Am I about to go in over my head in this endeavor? Where exactly is this going and when did it start?"

My decisive moment, like Henri Cartier-Bresson's, was the day I found a letter in our mailbox. It was an invitation to a party.


You are cordially invited to dinner at Mandalay House for our annual meeting of the Collector’s Club. Don’t forget to bring your nephew for his initiation on this exclusive special occasion. We look forward to seeing you both.

Sylvia and Louis Purloiner

I bounded up the stairs to the west wing, in through the oak double doors of the study and found my uncle with a feather duster in his hand, dusting one of the two Faberge eggs in his collection. I think it was the Necessaire, the one Alexander the Third gave to his wife Maria Fedorovna on Easter day, 1889. It was one of those pieces he wouldn’t let the servants near.

“It’s come, Uncle, it’s come!”

He looked up, recognized the stationary and smiled. “Now you’ll see what real collecting is all about.”

As if I didn’t know already. Just one look around the room the first day I arrived told me more than enough. The doorstop was one of my uncles first ‘rare pieces’. I looked like a worn-out brick, which it was, but no ordinary brick. My uncle had slipped it out of the wall of the Coliseum in Rome when he did a grand tour of Europe in his twenties. It was nearly two thousand years old.

‘Vespasian’s Dream’ he christened it.

“But Uncle, if every tourist had stolen a brick, they’re be nothing left by now.”

“You’re right, but I’ve got my piece here, a chunk of history, an Emperor’s dream if you will. And I’ll protect it. Vespasian imagined the Coliseum when he was in Sicily keeping bees, after Nero banished him for falling asleep during one of his poetry readings.”

That was my uncle. If the piece had an interesting provenance he wanted it. When he was poor and younger he collected simple things, and was limited. But then his grandfather left him a vanilla plantation in Tahiti, and that led to a coffee plantation in Sumatra. Long before Starbuck’s signed him as a preferred supplier he became rich, and his wealth enabled his collection to grow in value. The trouble was that good pieces were rare and dear, and since he’d been brought up a bargain hunter, he often sought out black-market suppliers.

He received special satisfaction in getting ‘impossible to obtain’ antiques with a "five-finger discount". He started off a young man, poor, grabbed an odd brick from the Colisseum when was no one was looking. Now he was old, rich, and possessed two Faberge eggs. It didn’t bother him in the least when a week later he read of an art robbery in a St. Petersburg museum.

“It only adds to the provenance,” he shrewdly calculated, and left it at that.

“How many others will be there, Uncle?”

“Oh, two or three couples more. It’s only a once a year affair, and they’re highly selective in who they invite.”

Uncle Silas returned the egg to its holder, a small cupped gold platform shaped like a bird’s foot.

From there he moved on to the shelves holding his rare book collection.

“I’ll be finished with these soon, and we can talk more over dinner. Are you still practicing the latest trick I bought you, what was it?”

“Haskell’s Diminishing Deck.”

“That’s the one we found in the shop in San Francisco, wasn’t it?”

“That’s it.”

“Will you be ready after dinner?”

“I think so.”

“Very well then, Max and myself will be your audience.”

He turned his attention and his feather duster to his precious books and I took my hint and left. I liked practicing before the two of them, my uncle had a keen eye, and Max was very direct for a butler, and forthcoming with his comments. I think he picked up the habit when he worked for a has-been movie star on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. She’d gotten in some sort of scandal, but he wouldn’t say anything more. I could always depend on Max for a truthful evaluation of my performance and to keep his mouth shut.

I would practice and practice, cut and restore bits of rope, change things from one thing to another, levitate, read minds, do a million and one card tricks. But my specialty was sleight of hand, because it took manual dexterity and misdirection.

Allow me to let you in on a secret. The best magic tricks are the ones where no one knows you’re doing them, just as the perfect crime is one that no one knows was committed.

It was my plan, no, my design, that that dinner at Mandalay was to be my crowning achievement in magic and crime wrapped up in one single flawless performance. It wasn’t that I needed the money mind you, but rather the fact I’d become profoundly addicted to the thrill.


©Steven Hunley 2016

https://youtu.be/ivTbd38NtWg Sunset Boulevard