Gold

“Daddy, I’m cold,” the little boy said.

“Sorry Bear, I wish I could make it warm,” he said as he hugged the little boy closer. It killed him to know his son was cold and that there was nothing he could do about it.

“Can’t we go back to that place from last night?”

“No. There are men there who don’t like us. They might hurt us if we go back.”

“But we had beds and food. And it was warm.”

“I know, Bear. If we could go back there, we would. It was a nice place, wasn’t it?”

The little boy nodded and pulled the thin blanket up tight under his chin.

Adam wished they could return to the shelter where they’d stayed the night before, but it wasn’t safe. There were two men there who didn’t like him. He had no idea why; he hadn’t wronged them in any way that he knew of. They were veterans of these Florida streets, and maybe drugs, drink and fighting for meals, cigarettes or places to sleep had baked their brains. Well, he was sure of that at least. Most people took those things for granted, life’s routine activities. He’d taken a few things for granted too, and now here they were, he and his five-year-old son Walter. Adam wouldn’t admit it to his boy, but he knew the reason the men didn’t like him. It was because of what he’d named his son. They thought Walter was an old name, archaic, outdated, and that the boy would be bullied for it. So in a twist of irony that was utterly lost on their disintegrating minds, they bullied Adam for his son’s name. What he hadn’t told them was that Walter had been his father’s name, and he’d bestowed the name on his son to honor the memory of the greatest man he’d ever known.

It was an unseasonably cold night for this latitude. Adam didn’t know the temperature, but he and Walter were both shivering. He’d gotten the blanket from a charity that handed out used clothing and other sundries, but it was insufficient against the chill. It didn’t help that they were outside lying on grass next to the low concrete wall of a skateboard park. Adam hugged Walter and did his best to warm the boy who eventually dozed off.

He woke the next morning after a mostly sleepless night. There was a soup kitchen not far from the park that served breakfast. Walter was still asleep but had rolled away, so Adam was able to get up without disturbing him. He could smell something cooking, and his stomach rumbled. Walter must have caught it too, because he sat up a moment later and rubbed his eyes.

“I’m hungry, Daddy.”

“Me too Bear. Let’s go find some food.”

They were walking out of the park when a high-pitched whining drew their attention. It was coming from underneath a leafy shrub. Adam, holding Walter’s hand, led him to it and knelt to have a look.

“What is it Daddy?” the little boy asked.

“I can’t tell. There are too many branches in the way.” Adam pushed them aside and had to poke his head in to see what was making the noise. A moment later he emerged holding a small yellow creature. It had dried blood on one of its back legs, and its ribs were showing.

“A puppy!” Walter exclaimed. He’d always loved dogs. The boy’s face fell when he saw the blood. “But it’s hurt.”

Adam took the dog, which looked to be about four months old, to a drinking fountain near a basketball court and with Walter’s help washed the blood off the dog’s leg revealing a small laceration.

“Is the doggy okay, daddy?”

“It’s got a little cut, but I think it’ll be okay.” He set the dog down, and it stood on wobbly legs. Adam cupped his hand and ran some water into it, then offered it to the dog. It drank greedily. “I think it’s more hungry and thirsty than hurt,” he said. Walter knelt down next to the thirsty puppy.

“What kinda dog is it?”

“Looks like a Lab or maybe a Golden Retriever, I’m not sure.”

Walter was petting the dog’s back while it drank. When it had enough the dog turned and licked Walter’s face. The boy giggled and hugged the puppy around its neck. Adam sighed. Apparently, even though they were homeless, they’d just adopted a dog.

---

The afternoon was warm, much warmer than the night had been, and Adam took Walter to the beach to play. The dog had not left them since he pulled it out from under the bush. They’d gone to the soup kitchen, the puppy trotting along next to them with no apparent discomfort in its injured leg, and gotten a good breakfast. The people serving had even given the dog a bowl of hash, which it had devoured.

“What are you gonna do with that thing?” an old man in a wheelchair behind them in line asked.

“Don’t know,” Adam said. Walter was too busy petting the dog and getting a tongue bath from it to notice the conversation.

“Well, you’re in no position to take care of it. How do you plan to feed a dog and the boy?” The man’s tone was angry and judgmental, and if Walter hadn’t been there, Adam would have lit into him about minding his own business. But that wasn’t the lesson he wanted to teach his son. Not yet anyway. No matter what happened he planned to raise his boy the way his own father had raised him – treat people with courtesy and grace, and pick your battles wisely. Some, like this one, just weren’t worth fighting.

“I’ll figure something out,” he said. A grunt was the only response.

They’d been at the beach for maybe an hour when an acquaintance of theirs, an older woman who’d been on the streets a long time and went by the name of Boxy, sat down next to them. The dog was sleeping peacefully in the sand after playing and running hard, and Walter had lain down next to it, his hand on its side. Now he was asleep too. Adam, after his restless night, felt like joining them.

“How you doin?” Boxy asked quietly.

“Got a new friend,” Adam answered with a nod toward the dog.

“I heard. Rocket D was complaining about you when I saw him a bit ago.” Boxy had very few teeth left, her hair was one giant grey dreadlock, and her clothes were ragged, but she knew everyone and everything that happened on these streets. She’d helped Adam and Walter out tremendously in learning how to live when they’d first ended up here a little over two months ago.

“Is he the one in the wheelchair?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Don’t pay no attention. He don’t like nobody. All he wants to do is complain.” She turned her heavily tanned and wrinkled face to the sun and closed her eyes.

“What brings you here today?” Adam asked through a yawn he couldn’t stifle.

“I wanted to see how that application was goin’, the one you put in for an apartment. Hear anything yet?”

Adam shook his head. “No. I went to the office the other day, but our caseworker wasn’t there. They told me to try again in two weeks.”

“Everythin’s two weeks,” Boxy said scornfully. “I hear that a lot from people tryin’ to get off the streets. Eventually they quite tryin’ at all. Just easier to live how they know.”

“Yeah, but I can’t do that,” Adam said.

Boxy looked at the sleeping Walter and the dog and nodded. “No. I suppose you can’t.”

They sat together in silence while waves washed across the sand a few paces away. A policeman on a four-wheeler rode by slowly, giving them a nod as he passed. The sound of the engine woke Walter and the dog who bounded toward the water and happily splashed in.

“Throw a stick for him,” Boxy called. Walter quickly found a suitable example and tossed it into the water. The dog immediately splashed in after it and returned dripping and happy, stick clamped between its jaws.

“How am I going do this?” Adam muttered.

“The same way you do everything else. One thing at a time,” Boxy replied. She looked at him pointedly, her brow slightly furrowed. “I’m gonna break one of my own laws,” she said, “and tell you how I got here, who I was before.”

Adam, his curiosity piqued, turned to look at Boxy. It was an unwritten rule that you didn’t tell others who you’d been, where you’d come from.

“You don’t have to,” Adam said.

Boxy waved him off. “I know, and normally I wouldn’t. But you’re not like most others out here. You’re one of the few who ain’t gonna spend his life on the streets. Die here. So I’ll tell you cos I know you won’t blabber it all over.”

Adam waited silently and returned his gaze to his son and the dog. Boxy looked at them too.

“That’s a Golden Retriever,” she said quietly. “Had one when I was a kid, and it was the best dog ever.” She sighed and traced her fingers in the sand. “There ain’t much to my story, really. I was a normal woman with a job, an apartment, all that. Never did get married or have kids. That wasn’t for me. And then one day the job and that life wasn’t either. I didn’t want it anymore, so I sold everything. My car, all my furniture and whatnot, donated what I couldn’t sell and left my apartment. Still had three months on the lease, but I didn’t care. They could sue me if they could find me, which they never did. And I came here, to the beach, cos of the sun. I was from a state up north. Won’t say which one, but it got cold there in winter, and I don’t like cold. Been here since. That was… let’s see… twenty-three years ago. I don’t miss that life. At all.” She emphasized the last two words to drive her point home.

Adam glanced at Boxy with a newfound respect. Many of the people on the streets, if not a solid majority of them, were here because of addiction or mental illness. Or both. She’d chosen this life. That was unusual from what he knew.

She looked toward Walter and the dog who were oblivious to everything but their stick throwing and fetching. The dog paused on its way out of the water and sniffed at the wet sand, scratched a paw across it a couple times, then sauntered toward Walter who was waiting for the stick.

“He’s a good boy. You’re doing well with him,” Boxy said.

“Just trying to raise him the way my dad raised me. He taught me right from wrong, responsibility, and that a good dog is orders of magnitude better than an average human.”

Boxy chuckled at that. “He was right. Do you still talk to him?”

Adam shook his head. “No. He passed away when I was seventeen. Brain cancer. Glide blast-o-rama or something like that the doctors called it. I never could remember the exact words. It didn’t really matter anyway. They said the cancer was going to kill my dad, and it did.”

“He taught you well, just like you’re teachin’ him,” she said with a nod toward the boy. Walter had gotten ankle deep into the water, and Adam was about to yell at him to come out when he did on his own.

“Is his mom still around?” Boxy asked.

Adam looked out to sea, past the boy and the dog, in silence. “No,” he finally said. “She’s gone.”

Boxy didn’t push for more.

The dog was panting and obviously tired. It waded ashore and flopped down on the beach a few feet from the water. Walter knelt next to it and stroked the wet fur.

“We’ll have to give him a bath to get all the salt off him,” Adam said. “At least, I hope it’s a him. I never looked.”

“It is,” Boxy said.

“I’m not sure how I’m going to feed the dog and us,” Adam muttered.

“You tryin’ to work?”

He nodded. “I’ve applied several places, but no one wants to hire me when I tell them about Walter and that I would need to bring him to work with me. No employer wants to be a babysitter. The economy is crap right now, and they have their pick of people. Why would anyone hire a homeless single dad? There’s a daycare that will take him, but they have a long wait list.”

“Let me guess. Two weeks?” she said with a grin.

Adam smiled back at the joking reference to his apartment application. “I wish it was only two weeks,” he chuckled.

Boxy shook her head. “It’s hard to get off the streets once you’re here.”

“When I get off them, I’m gonna do something to help the people out here who actually want help.”

“I’m sure you will,” Boxy said as she stood. “And there are a lot of them, like me, who don’t want help at all.” She paused and looked at the water with what Adam thought was wistfulness before turning back toward him. “You take care of the boy and his dog. I’ll see you around.”

Adam smiled as she walked away. She was so different from most people on the streets. She didn’t drink or get high, and you could hold a normal conversation with her like he just had. Boxy was an anomaly.

Adam stood and stretched. Even sand, which initially felt soft, could start to feel hard after a while. Walter was sitting next to the puppy and digging small holes which he immediately filled back in.

“Come on bear, we need to go find a place to get lunch and maybe something for the puppy.”

“What are we going to name him?”

“We’ll figure that out. Don’t have to decide right now.” Adam was still wondering how he was going to take care of the dog and his son.

Walter stood up as the dog roused from sleep and shook itself off. Grains of sand and a few residual droplets of seawater flew from its fur.

“Let’s go, Bear,” Adam said. Walter took his hand as they walked toward the street. They’d only gone a few steps when the boy stopped and looked back.

“Come on,” Walter said to the dog who’d stopped to sniff at the ground. Adam watched as its nose swept from side to side almost manically.

“I’ll bet someone buried a sandwich there,” he muttered. Walter had walked back to the dog and was doing his best to cajole it away from whatever it had found, but it would not be deterred.

“Let’s just walk away,” Adam said. “It’ll follow us.”

Walter started to say something when the dog began digging furiously at the sand. Gouts like water from a boat’s propellor spewed into the air. Adam watched bemusedly. Dogs dug. Usually for reasons known only to them. They didn’t have a leash or collar, so he couldn’t drag it away from its excavation, and Walter wasn’t going to leave it; he could tell by the boy’s body language. Waiting a minute or two wasn’t the end of the world.

The dog stopped digging and shoved its nose into the freshly dug hole. Then it dug some more, sniffed again, and dug again. Adam was perplexed. He knew dogs had an incredible sense of smell, but how deep was this thing it was trying to get? If there was even anything buried there. He was getting impatient. And hungry. The small servings of hash they’d gotten at the soup kitchen that morning had long since passed into the intestines, and his stomach was rumbling. He was not unacquainted with hunger, which made him all the more anxious to get to the soup kitchen for lunch while there might still be something left. But the danged dog was holding them up.

Annoyed, Adam walked back to stand next to his son and peered into the hole. The dog had stopped digging and was sniffing again. Then it did the strangest thing. It looked up not at Walter but at him and whined, then thrust its nose back into the hole. Adam knelt down and looked closer. The hole was nearly two feet deep by his estimate, but he couldn’t see anything in it. The dog whined again and looked at him.

“Do you want me to do something?” he asked. It whined yet again, took his hand gently in its mouth and dragged it toward the hole. “You want me to dig?” he asked. The dog cocked its head and looked at him. He would swear it was smiling. Its tongue was hanging out, corners of its mouth turned up, and its eyes were bright with an intelligence and comprehension well beyond the average dog.

“Okay then,” he said as he stuck his hands in the hole and began digging. Walter and the dog watched him intently.

He’d only gone about four inches when his fingers touched something hard. The sand this deep was damp and more compacted than the top layer which was dry, and it took some effort to get his fingers around it. Actually, there were several items. He felt at least four. They were small and round. Coins, they felt like coins. Adam dug the fingers of both hands in forcefully, cupped them around the small hoard, and lifted up and out.

“What is it, Daddy?” Walter asked.

“I’m not sure, Bear,” he said, “I think it’s some money.” Adam brought his hands in close to his chest and let them fall to the sides like flower petals opening, using both hands to form a sort of bowl. A glint of gold shone through the wet sand, and Adam quickly looked around. There were other people on the beach, but they weren’t close and hadn’t been paying attention anyway. Adam began slowly brushing the sand away. What he revealed shocked him. Four small gold coins. They were about the size of quarters, maybe a bit bigger, were obviously old, and some were emblazoned with writing that looked like Latin and symbols he didn’t recognize. One depicted the head of some man, probably a monarch, but he had no idea who. He’d seen coins like this before. They were often found in the myriad shipwrecks from centuries past that were scattered along the Florida coast. The coins were actual treasure, and the dog had led them to it. Adam quickly stuffed the coins in his pocket before anyone could happen along, and took his son’s hand.

“Let’s go find lunch, Bear,” he said. The dog trotted happily along behind them.