A SURVIVAL JOURNAL

A SURVIVAL JOURNAL

By Jesse Krenzel

On a dreary March morning, Michael Gertz trudged along behind his dog on their daily trek through the woods behind his home. The Gertz retirement dream property had become a place of solitary drudgery since Diane died, but Michael still went through the motions – walking the dog and gardening a little. It was all an act without Diane. As his depression deepened, he spent more time indoors, cleaning his old .38 caliber revolver and thinking about who might take in his dog, Marley, if he pulled the trigger. Michael had grown completely indifferent and disconnected from his own colorless life – until the morning he found the money.

The previous night’s downpour had washed through the seasonal creek at the back of his two-acre parcel. The puddles and pools of the remaining frigid rainwater became a playground for Marley. He ran ahead of Michael, splashing along the length of the stream with an abandon that almost raised Michael’s spirits a little. Then Marley stopped and began barking. Something had changed in Marley’s world.

Michael found him focused on some shiny objects in the streambed. Three ice cold silver dollars lay there, displaying their profiles of lady liberty. The glint of more metal shown in the earthen bank above the coins. He knelt and reached into a small cavity, feeling more coins, a wad of paper, and something else. After an hour of careful digging, he’d unearthed what appeared to be a rusty coffee can containing another 97 silver dollars, a small black journal-type book, and a tightly wrapped roll of currency. Years of erosion had exposed the end of the can and released some of its contents recently, he thought. The damp currency and journal were in surprisingly good shape.

For the first time in 10 months, Michael skipped his afternoon nap.

The cash totaled exactly $20,000, but it was the book that fascinated him. Its unlined pages were filled with fine pencil sketches of a home in the forest and animals – the deer, rabbits, and squirrels of the sort that he saw every day from his window. The images were stunningly lifelike with nuanced shading and detail that lent the sense of beauty and peace that Michael had once shared here with Diane.

On the last page, he found the only clue to the identity of the artist: three first names followed by sums of money that totaled the contents of the can:

John $5,000

Emily $7,500

David $7,500

But why was it buried, and by whom? Curiosity pulsed through Michael with an energy not felt in months. He fell asleep that night thinking about the sketches. The next morning, he woke early with a crazy thought and rushed down the cold hardwood hallway still tying his robe. The journal lay on the dining room table, opened to the house drawing. The resemblance was undeniable. It’s this house. It’s a pre-construction sketch of what the owners wanted this house to be. It varied a little from the actual home as to window size and placement, but this was it alright.

Michael ate a quick breakfast and shortened Marley’s walk to begin his research. He hadn’t felt this excited about anything since he and Diane had moved here from the city. It took him less than an hour researching county property records to identify John and Gertrude Mackey as the initial homeowners back in 1972. And then he got lucky, finding a distant relative who’d posted her ancestry research. The Mackey branch included three children of John and Gertrude: John, Emily, and David. Bingo.

Now what?

Michael took a walk with Marley to think it over. He didn’t need the money, and somehow the sketches let him see the beauty of the woods and the animals anew. He imagined it as the Mackeys first saw the forest without the home or yard. He’d find the Mackeys or their heirs.

After lunch, the research turned depressing. Children John and Emily died in the 1960’s, leaving no children. Gertrude passed in the early 1970’s, shortly after the home was completed. The first widower to live here passed away at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grass Valley in 1975. David, the last Mackey child, died in San Jose in 2002, leaving behind a child, Quinn, the last descendant of John and Gertrude. A paid search disclosed a Quinn Mackey with the correct birth year still living in San Jose, but his telephone number was disconnected.

#

Michael rose early to make the three-hour drive to Quinn Mackey’s South San Jose address. It was an older, working class neighborhood with two story stucco apartment buildings lining the street, each with a tiny patch of grass beyond the cracked root-raised sidewalks. He parked in front of the building and walked Marley to a bank of mailboxes next to an entry gate. A rush of adrenalin hit him when he saw “Mackey” on box 5. They passed through the gate and across a small open area to apartment 5. He rang the doorbell and then knocked when no one responded. Through a narrow gap in the drapes, he saw an empty swath of carpet and the bare opposite wall of a living room. Disappointed, he realized that the place might be vacant.

As he returned to the car, he saw a child’s face bob in the window of a nearby parked van. The little dark-haired girl peered at Marley, saying something and pointing. Michael waved. A woman appeared behind the child, disheveled and suspicious. She glanced at Michael and pulled the child away from the window.

Back at his car, Michael wrote a note asking Quinn Mackey to call him as soon as possible regarding an important matter. He folded the paper and walked it over to box #5. As he led Marley away, the side-panel door of the van slid open, and the child jumped out.

“Can I pet your dog?” she said. A cute kid, maybe 4 years-old, in a little pink dress with dark leggings. The mother followed with unkempt dark hair, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and sunglasses.

He said to the mother. “It’s okay. Marley loves kids.”

“Be gentle, Honey,” she said.

As Marley licked and nuzzled the child, Michael got a glimpse of the van interior through the open door: bedding, suitcases, scattered water bottles, and food wrappers. The van was a home. The woman saw Michael looking. “That’s enough, baby. Let the man leave with his dog.”

Before Michael could respond, she had the protesting child’s hand in hers, pulling her back to the van. She slid the door closed behind them.

Times are hard around here, but a child living in a van? Why not let the kid have a little joy? Speaking to the woman would do no good. He loaded Marley in the car and drove up the street to make a U-turn. On his way back past the van, the woman was at the Mackey mailbox, removing and reading his note. He hit the brakes and pulled to the curb. Her life might be hard, but that was no excuse to steal mail.

She looked up from the paper as he approached, her eyes wide with fright.

“There’s no money in the envelope,” he said. “Nothing to steal. Just a message to Mr. Mackey, so –”

“I know him,” she said.

He stopped, sensing a lie.

“Why do you want to talk to him?” she asked.

“It’s a private matter.”

“What matter?”

Michael tamped down his irritation. “I’m just trying to do something nice for Mackey and his relatives. That’s all. I’d appreciate your help, not your interference.”

When she said nothing, he scoffed and trudged back towards the car. How foolish of him to think he could drive into town and wrap this up in an afternoon. That money had been in the ground for 45 years. It could wait a few more weeks for a written inquiry to the post office about Mackey’s current address. Sitting in the car, he tried to think of anything more he might do to further search while in San Jose.

The van woman approached warily with her arms folded across her chest. “Mackey doesn’t have any relatives, you know. Are you a bill collector?”

“No.”

“Are you from Child Protective Services?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want with him?”

Seeing both fear and defiance in her face, Michael finally connected the dots. “You’re staking out the mailboxes because you receive your mail here, but you don’t live here anymore, do you?”

She said nothing.

“You’re Quinn Mackey, aren’t you?”

#

The three of them went to a nearby park with sandwiches bought by Michael on the way. While Laurie threw a ball for Marley, her mother described how she and her child came to live in a van. “Four months ago, my tech company laid off a hundred of us on a Friday afternoon. No advance notice. Just a two week’s severance. I could’ve handled it if EDD had paid my unemployment, but they suspended benefits for over a million people. I call EDD and check the mail every day, but still nothing from them.”

“Laurie’s father?” he asked.

“Gone since she was two.”

When they finished their sandwiches at a green wooden picnic table, he handed her the journal. “I think this belonged to your grandparents.”

She looked puzzled until she began paging through the drawings. “I remember my grandmother’s drawings. My dad used to have some of them.” She paused at the sketch of the house. “He told me about my grandparents’ wonderful place in the mountains with a cottage out back. He made it sound like heaven.” She shook her head. “I haven’t thought about that in a long time.” She looked at Michael. “Where did you get this?”

“I live in that house now,” he said. “I found the journal in a coffee can buried in the yard.”

“What? Why would they do that?”

“I’m guessing that John hid it there temporarily when he went into the hospital, but he never made it home again.”

She looked puzzled. “This book must have meant a lot to him.”

“That and the $20,000 he buried with it.”

She dropped the sunglasses dangling from her fingers. “What?”

“He probably thought it was safer in the ground than under his mattress. Anyway, it’s yours. I left it in a safety deposit box in Grass Valley. I can wire the currency, but you should have a collector appraise the silver dollars.”

She hooded her eyes with her hands, saying nothing for a long time. “I really want to believe you.”

He grinned and laid three of the silver dollars on the table. “You’ve got to believe in something.”

“Yeah? What do you believe in?”

He took a deep breath and released it. “Touché. But there are better places to live and work than around here, you know.”

“Yeah, and what you found means that I’ll finally have a choice.”

The conversation paused. Then he shrugged. “Maybe you’d like to see your grandparents’ old place. The cottage is still there, a little dusty, but nice.” Her expression changed. She obviously liked the idea. “But you should do it soon,” he added.

“Why? Are you going somewhere?”

He thought about that for a moment, watching Laurie Mackey running with Marley, laughing, and hugging the dog in the warm spring sunshine. “No, I don’t think so.”

END