Treasure Map by Everett Maroon

He peers into the hole, dabbing at his brow with a damp handkerchief. The shovel has found every large stone in this 3-square foot area. Beating down on both of them is the early summer sun, but he, much older than his companion, feels it a lot more, especially in his knees and the middle of his back.

She squats down easily, inspecting the rough sides of what looks like an overgrown divot in the grass, and though she is only twelve years old she has a lot of experience with the central New Jersey soil and rock, much to her mother’s consternation. With nimble, dirty fingers she retrieves a stone, rolling it over as if it signals some clue they need.

“You haven’t gotten very far,” she tells him, brushing dregs of red clay onto her jeans before standing up. She is only about six inches shorter than him.

“I realize that.” He takes care not to sound sharp with her.

He stabs at the ground, and again the metal grinds against stone, making a sound as irritating as nails on a chalkboard. Without meaning to, he grunts as he digs. Now the sweat and humidity have wilted his shirt collar. This is not the way he envisioned the afternoon would proceed.

He asks her if she’s sure this is the spot, making sure he’s quiet about it because he knows her feelings are easily hurt.

“Yes, I’m sure.” She pulls a wrinkled map out of her back pocket.

Faded blue lines streak across the paper, with broad brown writing upstaging the rules where she was supposed to practice her penmanship. Instead she’d gotten excited by an episode of Mr. Wizard’s World and as soon as she’d learned she could draw a treasure map in lemon juice, she put off her math homework and attempted to fashion directions to something terrific. Except she didn’t have anything important to bury, and for sure she’d need to sneak this project under her mother’s radar. Danielle looks at the number of paces again, using her index finger to keep focus as she calculates. Steps are drawn off to the side, in clumps of five hash marks, an inch or so above a compass guide. She should not have tried to draw a dragon in lemon juice with a toothpick, because it looks horrible and decidedly un-dragonlike.

“It should be right here,” she says, pointing to the disturbed earth at their feet, but lacking the confidence she had just a moment earlier.

“May I see it?”

She wonders when he got so mannerly, because she couldn’t be less interested in that Dear Abby nonsense.

She passes it to him and stifles a grumble because she knows how to read her own map. Self-doubt has evaporated just as quickly as it arrived.

“So this is the tree here,” he asks. He tries to remember if this was always the way the backyard met up with the woods. It’s been so long.

Danielle leans in, and they study the slip of paper together. Everything has become so absurd, but she has put in too much energy now to back down from locating the box. Filled with something like a hundred Susan B. Anthony dollars and whatever else she can’t recall, he’s apparently desperate for it.

“Come to think of it, maybe it’s this tree.” She walks back to her starting point, 60 yards away, where the uneven bricks of the patio end and sod picks up. He tries not to stare at her gait, not to watch for any tell-tale signs. Soon enough Danielle is back across the lawn, now standing about 30 feet further west from his location.

“Try over here, Derrick,” she yells. His name feels funny in her mouth, unreal.

He hurries over, worrying about how all of this activity must look to whatever neighbors are around.

This time the spade sinks easily through the grass and he tilts the long handle back, bringing up a good measure of earth. Finally a smile breaks across Derrick’s face.

“I think this may be it,” he says, as sweat rolls past his temples. He feels the lunch pail, and gets on his knees, creaky as they are, ignoring that it’s time to take his pills. The green and orange picture of the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine van peeks out at them.

“Yay,” Danielle says, grabbing the handle which is secured on only one side, the other connection having dissolved away into the ground. She catches her breath. What if what he said is true?

“You don’t have to be scared,” says Derrick, brushing black dirt out from between the seams of the lid and box. “We can put this back in just a couple of minutes.” He walks over toward a tree nearest them and sits under it, noticing that the cancer inside him is pushing on his bladder. Danielle walks up and sits beside him, feeling the rough bark through her t-shirt. It’s a new shirt that she got at the mall, having selected the Ghostbusters logo from the lineup of emblems on the wall at the small store. But she didn’t actually believe in ghosts or magic before today.

“I still think it’s weird that you did this,” she says, unable to refrain from bringing up the subject again.

“I know, kid, I know.” He opens the box, a rough prospect after so much of the hinge has rusted shut. Wrapped in newspaper are the coins they expected, and he brushes past them, still looking. Guatemalan worry dolls, far from where they could provide any help. They’re supposed to be placed where they can resolve problems, he recalls.

“I don’t remember putting it in there, you know,” she says.

Danielle has told him this already, but he knows it’s here. He sees a corner of plastic. It found its way to the farthest corner of the box. He holds the clump of baby hair up to the light—delicate, thin brown hairs wrapped in cellophane.

Danielle wants to hold it, but Derrick says she can see it from where she is. He gives her a sideways glance and asks if she’s nervous. She nods.

“I believe that I become you, but why can’t we just let it happen the way it did? Why can’t you just get to a doctor before you get so sick?”

It’s a perfectly good question, and a smart one from a pre-teen, but intelligence has never been his problem.

He sizes her up, considering how much he should tell her and how much he’s obligated to say. Because they’re the same person, does he need his earlier self’s permission?

“I like my life right now,” she says, not exactly looking for a defense. Maybe he has just imitated her scars on his own body.

“Yes, I was pretty happy until my body started changing in puberty,” he says. He doesn’t want to overwrite the child’s attitude, or show her too much of the future.

“It’s really that bad?”

“It solves a lot of problems if we just do this.” Derrick knows when the hair was taken, his first day home after the birth. It’s the best anchor, a new start.

Danielle frowns at the lock, which reminds her of the ancient bug trapped in amber that sits in the glass case in science class.

“I just wonder, maybe I won’t be the same person if I start out as a boy.”

Too smart, this one, he thinks. Derrick nods his head. He’s come all this way, at great risk and expense, and yet, he’s forgotten to ask the simplest of questions.

She takes his hand and compares the folds in their palms. His are deeper, his skin less elastic.

“You’re dying,” she asks.

“Yes. It’s not your, or my fault.”

“Doctors refused to treat you?”

“It’s the law where I come from. We’re on our own, so resources are limited.”

“If you change our history, will we remember who we used to be?” Danielle feels her own palm instead of looking at him.

“I honestly don’t know. Probably not,” he says, laying his infancy on top of the Mystery Machine.

“I don’t want to die at 47,” she tells Derrick.

“But I want to become the person you are.” She grabs the packet of hair off of the lunch box and bolts into the woods, knowing he can’t keep up with her. Only once Danielle has scattered the clipping in the creek does she walk back to the boundary of her parents’ property. He is still under the tree, looking somewhat grayer than before. She apologizes, and Derrick waves her off.

“I would have done the same thing,” he says, smiling again.

END